Hyper-V and attaching physical disks [migrated]

Posted by Mike Christiansen on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Mike Christiansen
Published on 2011-11-12T16:17:56Z Indexed on 2011/11/12 17:54 UTC
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hyper-v

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hard-drive

So, I'm looking at rebuilding my home server. My current setup is the following

Windows 7 Ultimate
1TB Boot Drive (my smallest drive)
Windows Dynamic Spanned volume, continaing 1x 1TB drive, 2x 2TB drives, totalling 5TB.

I am upgrading to a hardware RAID controller, and I would like to run Hyper-V server core. However, I want to retain the ability to join my "file server" to a homegroup, so I must use Windows 7. I know VHDs can only be like 127GB or something, so I obviously need to directly connect disks to my Windows 7 machine. Here is my plan:

Server Core 2008 R2 (Hyper-V)
1TB Boot Drive (storing VHDs for boot drives of VMs) - possibly in a RAID 1 with my other 1TB drive
5x 2TB drives (1x 2TB drive hot spare), totalling 10TB, directly attached to a Windows 7 VM, for use of homegroup for this array.

In the past, I directly attached the windows dynamic volume to a Windows 7 VM, and performance was abysmal. The question is, with hardware RAID, will it really make that much of a difference?

Server specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz
Asus Maximus II Formula (PCI-E x16)
8GB DDR2 RAM PC2-6400

(Yes, I know its a bit out of date)

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