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I got a little homeserver which runs a Windows as FileServer and hosts a Ubuntu-VM for little monitoring tasks and other stuff that are not available in Windows.
In the past however, this lead to some unnecessary downtimes, because of reboots wich were caused by Windows-Updates.

I now want to reinstall the system to have a fully virtualized System where both Windows and Ubuntu are virualized. However the Windows (used as Fileserver) should have a RAID1-Setup for the famalys data. (i don't think it does matter if the RAID runs within the Windows-VM or on the Host System?)

Someone knows what the best solution is for this? I tried XenServer and VMWares ESXi, but ESXi does not detect my NIC and XenServer is neither capable of RAID1 Setups nor HDD-Disk pathtrough.

Someone got any ideas how to do this?
Note: The Ubuntu-VM does need a Serial-Device from the USB-Hub.

HDDs:

  • 1x 120GB SSD - Host OperatingSystem + VMs
  • 2x 10TB HDD - Should run in RAID1 and hold Familys Data
manman
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    ESXi doesn't support software RAID. – Zac67 Oct 30 '17 at 12:07
  • but it does support hdd-passthrough, doesn't it? ... in this way a raid1 on the VM would be possible ;-) – manman Oct 30 '17 at 16:37
  • Inside the guest, you can also build an array out of VMDKs, no need for passthrough - however, that isn't exactly the point of virtualization... – Zac67 Oct 30 '17 at 17:13
  • use Hyper-V 2016 as a hypervisor. Use storage spaces built-in functionality to setup 2x 10TB HDD in RAID 10. On Hyper-V setup 2 required VMs: Windows for File Server and Linux. – Mr. Raspberry Oct 31 '17 at 17:47
  • @all ... I ended up buying a 12€ Network-Card and using ESXi. – manman Nov 04 '17 at 01:14

1 Answers1

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If the host doesn't support software RAID, you can use software raid from the guest OS.

Another solution would be to use Linux+KVM as host/hypervisor and create the software RAID from Linux. You have a couple of choices to do this: ZFS, LVM (or any device mapper based solution), md, btrfs.

Mircea Vutcovici
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  • but XenServer does not support that and also no direct passthrough to the VMs... so there is no way for any software-raid i think. which linux is common to use it for KVM? Im not really into that. any suggestions? maybe common distributions for host-systems/hypervisors? – manman Oct 30 '17 at 16:40