Migrating Pooled WHS To A Guest Virtual Machine

[keeplearnin 4]

Hey there I have a question that I have been pondering. I currently have a standalone HP N40L running WHS 2011 installed on the native 250 gb drive with 2 western digital 2TB reds. I have the StabilBit DrivePool  add-in installed and I am pooling those two drives which has been working out nicely. I have other production boxes running throughout my house that I am planning to move to a beefy virtual server using VMware ESXI to consolidate my environment and take advantage of ESXI. So I figured why not move my home server over to the virtual server and re-purpose my N40L for some lab testing. I have a good amount of experience with ESXI but I am not sure how I should go about virtualizing my WHS 2011 box that is pooled with about 2 TB’s of existing data. Should I even try to move the pooled windows home server install to my virtual server box?

 

Some further notes that may help in your suggestions.

 

I am not really looking to go raid here as the 4 TB’s of pooled hard drive space is more than enough for my wife and myself.

 

I am guessing I can provision the two reds to my virtual machine box and pool those two drives just as I did on the N40L physical box.

 

I am not tied to ESXI, if you feel I should go the Server 2012 route with Hyper-V I would definitely consider that.

 

Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions. I am just looking for some techniques and suggestions that I should consider.

 

Future Virtual Server Box Specs (Working on the build this week!)

• Core i7 860
• 16 GB ram
• 2x120 ssd
• 2x2 tb reds 

[jmwills 284]

Since you have 8 gigs of RAM you cannot use, I'd definitely go virtual.  There is a VM app (bad word) for a P2V migration, I believe its called VMWare-converter-all

[keeplearnin 4]

Sounds good thanks

[oj88 134]

I'm also considering a similar approach and currently on test stage. My server is currently running WHS2011 physically from a 2TB system drive (which contains the standard C: and D: partition). Data is on a pool of five (5) physical disks running Drive Bender.

 

I've got as far as converting the physical system drive into a VHD file using Disk2vhd, which then booted up successfully as a guest OS on my test Windows Server 2012 running on another machine, barring a few errors about missing shares, etc. I'm then able to pass-through a spare hard disk into the guest WHS2011 and I can see how this strategy should make Drive Bender work again if I pass-through all the existing pooled drives.

 

I would imagine that it would be a similar thing with DrivePool.