keeplearnin 4 Posted June 24, 2013 Share Posted June 24, 2013 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 Link to post Share on other sites
jmwills 284 Posted June 24, 2013 Share Posted June 24, 2013 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 Link to post Share on other sites
keeplearnin 4 Posted June 25, 2013 Author Share Posted June 25, 2013 Sounds good thanks Link to post Share on other sites
oj88 134 Posted June 25, 2013 Share Posted June 25, 2013 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. Link to post Share on other sites
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