Hyper-V operational Question

[ChrisBaksa]

Hello All,

I have a scenario that I'm toying with and I'm trying to get some answers as to what the final outcome will be. let me first set the stage. I have not actually played with Hyper-V yet which is why I am asking these questions and I have no way to actually test due to lack of hardware.

I run a dell Poweredge 2950 (72 gig mirrored boot volume and 146 gig x 6 Raid 5 volume for data). It has windows 2003 R2 64 bit installed and VMware Server Ver 2. I run 3 VM's on this box (DC, Exchange/Web, App server). The Host itself also acts as my file server. The Raid 5 Data drive contains all the VM files as will as all my Media, Application library, User data, etc... I also have 2 external USB/Firewire mass storage devices attached to this box for addition storage and data backup.

With that said, my plan is to rebuild this box with Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. I would build a temp box and move my VM's to it while I rebuilt the Dell with 2008 and Hyper-V. This way my environmet would still be up and running. The Raid 5 data drive would remain intact with all it's data. I would then convert my VMWare VM's to Hyper-V VM's.

So in theory, when I install Hyper-V the host OS now becomes a "virtual" but is still the Controll OS. My question is... Will the Control OS still see the Raid 5 Data volume as it did before I installed Hyper-V? Remember I used the Host OS (in this case the control VM) as my file server. I would simply reshare/repermission my data at this point and I'm done. But if the Control OS does not see the volume as it's own, I loose the functionality that I had and I waste alot of high performance RAID disk space. This is why I dont want to install VMWare 3i. I would loose all the space that I currently use as a fileserver forcinng me to move all that data to an external (slow) storage device.

Does anyone know how this will play out? The hardware is fully capable of running a Hypervisor, and my end goal is to do just that. What I dont want to do is embed all my file server data into a VM. If I have a problem with the VM, I'm screwed and teh data will most likely be lost. But if the Machine will not boot for what ever reason, I can boot off a pe disk and get my data.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance

Chris

[cluberti]

Hyper-v will see the partition as it was before, but you will obviously have to redo permissions on the objects on the volumes.

[fizban2]

if you want to keep the same structure you are using now, install 2008 standard with Hyper-V. this will allow you to use your host OS (the physical machine) as the file server as you did before. While also being able to migrate all your VM's to hyperV

[ChrisBaksa]

Thanks. That is what I was hoping for.

Chris