Questions on virtualizing my WHS

S

S-F

Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2010
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I'm planning on virtualizing my WHS. I have a system with a Q6600 which is well overclocked and I use it to encode video. I was using it as a desktop but I have replaced it with a mini ITX system and moved it to the basement. I'm going to put it in a Norco 4224 and run my WHS in VMWare. So the big question is: can I image my current WHS system drive and just install it to a virtual machine? I know that disk cloning of a WHS system disk is a nightmare but maybe it will work since I'll be installing it in VMWare? Also, how would I connect the disks from the storage pool? I have seen talk here of using Hyper - V and setting the disks to pass through. I'm not sure of how this works in VMWare.

If I end up needing to "reinstall" how would I go about giving it the disks?

Thanks everyone.
 
I don't think you can image a physical install to a virtual install, if that is what your asking. Hyper-V, Virtualbox, they all use their own drivers to emulate hardware so your install would not be stable (or most likely not even work at all). It would essentially be the same as taking a harddrive of Windows and putting it in a totally different computer, which never ends well.

At least this is my interpretation so far using Virtualbox & Hyper-V.
 
You can try doing a P2V in VMware using the converter. You'll obviously need a large enough space to image it to, but as long as you have that, you should be fine. You can setup different virtual disks on different volumes if you have to so that you have space.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
 
I haven't done this yet but my desire is to used the VT-d function to pass through my RAID controller to the storage VM. It then has direct access to the disks. One is hoping that with MAID the disks will spin down automatically (eventually!) when I switch the VM off but I haven't tested this yet. I keep meaning to post this question in the data storage section. Obvious requisite is that your motherboard supports VT-d, or the AMD equivalent assuming there is one.

Hyper-V is a lot easier, you just set the disk set offline in the host and allocate it to the guest in the guest config.
 
I would personally spend a few extra bucks and buy two 1TB drives. Mirror those for your VMWare drive that will house the OS install. From there, try doing the server re-installation (search forums here or google to get instructions how to re-install a new system disk without wiping the pools).

Also, as a thought, I would be a bit nervous about an overclocked Q6600 running my virtualized storage (or non-virtualized for that matter).
 
I currently have the system running on a RAID 1array and I plan on using it for the VM image. The host OS will be ruinning on a RAID 1 array of SSD's. So it sounds like I need to do a reinstallation. How would I set up the disks in VMWare so they will be there for the reinstall process to find? I'm not going to do the leap frog migrate business. That's a nightmare and will take days. About the OC'd Q6600, I will be replacing it with a DP SupoerMicro board when I get a job, and hence money. As for now the Q6600 has been rock solid stable for 2 years. I press it pretty hard all the time so I think it's good. And the cooling on it is out of control.

Thanks for all the input.
 
What VMware product?
What mobo do you have?

FYI: WHS doesnt work very well in VMware because of DE
 
VMware workstation.

Gigabyte EP45 UD3P

Bummer.

Maybe I'll hold off or try to score a copy of server 3008 R2.
 
Technet Pro subscription + coupon code is your friend.
 
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If you are willing to go the Hyper-V route there is a free edition. No GUI though so you need another computer to put the admin tools on. I've not used it (Core installation), I assume you can pass the disks through to the guests just like any other Hyper-V version but not actually tried it.
 
When I migrated my WHS to a Hyper-V VM image, all I had to do was give the new VM physical disk access to the hard drive where WHS was installed, as well as physical disk access to the rest of the WHS drives. Made sure it was set to boot off the original WHS system drive in the VM, started it up... and, surprisingly, it worked perfectly. Redetected a ton of hardware, and asked me to activate Windows again, but no BSODs, crashes, or other such problems.

Whether it will do the same in VMWare, well, who knows.
 
odditory said:
Technet Pro subscription + coupon code is your friend.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Looks like with a coupon I can get it for about $280. What happens to the licenses once the subscription expires?

mpeg4v3 said:
When I migrated my WHS to a Hyper-V VM image, all I had to do was give the new VM physical disk access to the hard drive where WHS was installed, as well as physical disk access to the rest of the WHS drives. Made sure it was set to boot off the original WHS system drive in the VM, started it up... and, surprisingly, it worked perfectly. Redetected a ton of hardware, and asked me to activate Windows again, but no BSODs, crashes, or other such problems.
.
Click to expand...

Very interesting. Could you tell me a little more about this? I have no experience with Hyper-V so I'm not properly following your procedure.
 
Your licenses are still good after the subscription expires.

What he is saying is that in Hyper-V you can actually setup Physical Disk Pass-Through, instead of creating VHD's.
So you just have to create 1x 65gb vhd for the WHS-OS to install to and do physical pass through for all of your disk. The installer will see the pass through disk just like it would if you were reinstalling on the actual hardware and not a VM.
Heres mine
34fi739.png
 
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nitrobass24 said:
Your licenses are still good after the subscription expires.

What he is saying is that in Hyper-V you can actually setup Physical Disk Pass-Through, instead of creating VHD's.
So you just have to create 1x 65gb vhd for the WHS-OS to install to and do physical pass through for all of your disk. The installer will see the pass through disk just like it would if you were reinstalling on the actual hardware and not a VM.
Heres mine
http://i53.tinypic.com/34fi739.png
Click to expand...

Pretty much, except instead of creating the 1x 65gb VHD for the WHS-OS, I just set the disk with the already-installed copy of WHS as a pass-through disk, and then specified the virtual machine to boot off that disk.
 
Thanks for the information AAC. I just might give this a try... providing I can get my hands on a copy of Server 2008 R2. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this process?
 
there's nothing else to say. grab technet pro, its an investment. you'll be in the club that gets stuff as soon as it hits RTM. For starters, WHS v2 which you'd assumably want.

nitrobass already laid out the best way to virtualize WHS - Hyper-V is definitely the way to go, and now with dynamic memory added in the upcoming SP1, its even more bad ass. I've been experimenting with it a few days, since the SP1 beta was released - it gives memory to VM's on-demand, and reclaims it back when usage settles down. in nitrobass's screenshot above, instead of tying up 2048MB of static physical memory from his host system, one could set it to 512MB minimum and 2048MB max, and the VM will only use what it needs on top of the base 512MB. It would probably hover around 600-700MB for 99.9% of the time.
 
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Now, when doing this is it something you need to do for every newly added hdd or can you set it once and forget about it?
 
No1451 said:
Now, when doing this is it something you need to do for every newly added hdd or can you set it once and forget about it?
Click to expand...

You need to basically plug-in the drive, set it to offline, add to the Hyper-V VM's SCSI controller and that's it. It may take a few minutes if you are doing it for the first time, but after drive 3 or 4 it becomes a few seconds.
 
pjkenned said:
You need to basically plug-in the drive, set it to offline, add to the Hyper-V VM's SCSI controller and that's it. It may take a few minutes if you are doing it for the first time, but after drive 3 or 4 it becomes a few seconds.
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks for the reply, can't wait to try this out
 
My one (and only) gripe after virtualizing my WHS with Hyper-V is that there is no way to hot-swap disks. With Native WHS you could always remove a drive from the DE pool, pull it, replace it, add a drive, whatever, with the server still running. With Hyper-V you have to shut down the server to expose a drive to it or remove a drive.

Not a big deal. Given all of the advantages after virtualizign I will choose to live with this, but it would be nice to get Hyper-V to support this.
 
PigLover said:
My one (and only) gripe after virtualizing my WHS with Hyper-V is that there is no way to hot-swap disks. With Native WHS you could always remove a drive from the DE pool, pull it, replace it, add a drive, whatever, with the server still running. With Hyper-V you have to shut down the server to expose a drive to it or remove a drive.

Not a big deal. Given all of the advantages after virtualizign I will choose to live with this, but it would be nice to get Hyper-V to support this.
Click to expand...

All you have to do is open the settings of the VM and remove the disk from the scsi controller. Click OK. Then pull the disk.
Yes you can do this with it running.
 
nitrobass24 said:
All you have to do is open the settings of the VM and remove the disk from the scsi controller. Click OK. Then pull the disk.
Yes you can do this with it running.
Click to expand...

But Hyper-V won't let you add a disk to the VM without shutting it down first...
 
nitrobass24 said:
Yes you can. I just did it to make sure.
Click to expand...

Yea... the trick is that you just put the drive on the SCSI controller. That is one of the things you learn by doing this with the fourth drive with Hyper-V since you run out of IDE ports if you are doing it wrong in the first place.
 
pjkenned said:
Yea... the trick is that you just put the drive on the SCSI controller. That is one of the things you learn by doing this with the fourth drive with Hyper-V since you run out of IDE ports if you are doing it wrong in the first place.
Click to expand...

Could you please elaborate on this? There are only 4 IDE ports in Hyper-V?

This is all great information and discussion. Thank you everyone for posting. Maybe in the future this thread will help others virtualize their WHS systems.
 
While not the exact situation, I'd like to add what I have done with one of my storage servers, which should work if you have the correct hardware.

It's a Supermicro barebones 4U/workstation, running ESXi. It supports VT-D, and for my Nexentastor virtual machine, I have passed the onboard LSI SAS controller to the guest VM. The host no longer has any access to the SAS controller, so swapping/adding/removing/etc would be handled completely by the guest. This makes storage systems like ZFS/WHS a bit more standalone with regards to needing to explicitly pass through via the host.

This works perfectly for me because the motherboard has 2 hard drive controllers, so the SATA is used for vm storage, and the SAS is given to the storage guest. I also have a separate server that gives faster storage via iSCSI to the host if my single host drive becomes a bottleneck.
 
Yeah that works too, but the only downfall for me is that you have to

a) have a compatible controller
b) only a single guest can have rights to the controller, so if you want to share disks to multiple VMs then you need another controller.

Both have their pros/cons.
 
S-F said:
Could you please elaborate on this? There are only 4 IDE ports in Hyper-V?

This is all great information and discussion. Thank you everyone for posting. Maybe in the future this thread will help others virtualize their WHS systems.
Click to expand...

Each VM has a maximum of 4 IDE ports.
If you want to add devices(HDDs, CD-rom) they must be added as SCSI.

TBH i only use SCSI ports for everything but my boot volumes because the performance is better.
 
I don't think you can boot from the SCSI controller either.

In either case, with Hyper-V just make a 80GB virtual disk on a RAID 1 volume that you can use for either Server 2008 R2 or Hyper-V server, and attach that to the VM IDE controller. WHS doesn't need a big system drive.
 
Right. I have 2 SSD's for the host OS and 2 x 250 GB drives RAID 1 (both on an ARC 1210) for the WHS VM. I'm getting my ducks in a row for this as I watch this thread unfold.
 
Can anyone point me to a coupon code? I can't seem to find one that works?
 
By "almost" what do you mean? Will it have Vail? Does it include Server 2008 R2? I don't think I really need anything else. Is the reason people get pro just because there are often coupons for it? Even with the coupon it still was much more than $200.
On a side note, I'm trying to get Server 2008 R2 from my school. They are dragging their feet about getting back to me though.
 
nitrobass24 said:
What he is saying is that in Hyper-V you can actually setup Physical Disk Pass-Through, instead of creating VHD's.
So you just have to create 1x 65gb vhd for the WHS-OS to install to and do physical pass through for all of your disk. The installer will see the pass through disk just like it would if you were reinstalling on the actual hardware and not a VM.
Heres mine
Click to expand...
Pretty cool!

I've always wondered about this virtual stuff but every time I try to get an "overview" it looks way too complicated.

That pic that Nitrobass posted was worth a 1000 words....big Thumbs-Up!

My WHS is only 32bits but it shouldn't matter because I need to install the Hyper-V on my main machine (Asus P6T, Intel 920, w7 64bit)....correct?
 
S-F said:
By "almost" what do you mean? Will it have Vail? Does it include Server 2008 R2? I don't think I really need anything else. Is the reason people get pro just because there are often coupons for it? Even with the coupon it still was much more than $200.
On a side note, I'm trying to get Server 2008 R2 from my school. They are dragging their feet about getting back to me though.
Click to expand...

I dont know if it will have VAIL because its not released. Yes it includes 2008R2. I would look at the link i provided and see if it includes WHSv1. If so it would be safe to assume that vail will be included.
 
nitrobass24 said:
I dont know if it will have VAIL because its not released. Yes it includes 2008R2. I would look at the link i provided and see if it includes WHSv1. If so it would be safe to assume that vail will be included.
Click to expand...

V1 sure is listed on there. Hopefully Vail will be also. Actually I seem to remember there being a bit of talk regarding V1 not going up on technet right away. Hopefully this won't be the case with Vail.
Thanks for pointing this out nitrobass24. If school doesn't come through with Server 2008 R2 I'll get the standard subscription.
 
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