Hello, I have been searching for a solution for the following type scenarios that may work and also be supported.
I am going to post a similar question in a VMWare Forum and will reference it later as it could potentially apply to both hyper visors and virtual disk formats.
To keep things simple here, I will keep every thing Hyper-V.
Customer has a file server that the drive is growing over 2TB. Once a VHDX gets to that size in a small business I get concerned that moving the disk from one system to another could be difficult due to its pure size, not to mention it is still growing.
Say there are like 4 top level folders each at 500GB. I could split them out on different drives and put them to 1TB disks and then DFS (smoke and mirrors) make a single share. But if any of those folders grow, then I will have to split that data again in the future to keep the disk size of each VHDX down.
What I would like to do is have a spanned disk pool with no resiliency (as the resiliency is on the SAN already). Have 4 x 500GB VHDX's and SPAN them together with Disk management or Storage Spaces within the VM. That way as the data grows, it would be possible to add a couple more 500GB VHDX's to the SPAN increasing the space available without splitting the data.
From reading I have done, this is not supported in a GUEST OS. Is there any solution that can be used for splitting up a large VHDX file into multiple files while still presenting a single drive to the OS? This would allow the smaller 500GB Drives to be more manageable vs the 2TB drive which is growing larger each day.
What I would like to do is have multiple VHDX files at approx 300GB and make a storage pool with them in Storage Spaces.
Are Spanned Volumes through Disk Management supported inside a Virtaul Machine for Production Data?
What is the set back if it is??
Does anyone know if VHDX's utilized in a Virtual Machine for a storage pool in Storage Space's is supported or not and provide a reference?
The hardware I am using is a Fibre Channel San to 3 clustered nodes. I thought about doing this directly on the host, but even that way you would not be able to move the VHDX's separately and yet again not supported in a cluster.
Essentially I am trying to find a way to have a very large single disk (VHDX), which is broken down into manageable files.
If anyone would mind giving me their opinions and methods that they have utilized in the past, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you,
Schuyler