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Thursday, October 1, 2009

Hot swapped hard disk in Hyper V R2

As Windows Server 2008 Hyper V has been around since late 2008, you may notice that it cannot perform hot swap hard disk in virtual machine. But soon, all this will change as Microsoft will release Windows Server 2008 Hyper V R2 in another few more weeks.

The primary hard disk which is use for bootable disk is still IDE disk. In order to support hot swap hdd, you must add Virtual SCSI controller. In R2 Microsoft has enhanced to support up 64 HDD in Virtual SCSI controller compare to previous support is 32.

On R2 , you  can now add/remove hard disk when the VM is still running.

To support this, attached Virtual SCSI controller first when the VM is offline.

1. Right click the VM and select Settings.

2. On the Add Hardware, select SCSI controller and click Add

3. Power on the VM. While the VM is running, click on the Virtual SCSI controller and Add new Hard Disk .

4. On the new hard drive, Click New to create new disk or Click Browse to add existing hard disk

Cool right! This is one of the new features for R2.