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That's not so much esoteric as old-school. When VHD was the only other option, it was the standard way of getting decent performance out of iSCSI or large direc
by teilo 9y ago
That's not so much esoteric as old-school. When VHD was the only other option, it was the standard way of getting decent performance out of iSCSI or large direct-attached volums. But with VHDX, passthrough gains you so little that it's not worth losing the ability to checkpoint volumes and do agentless backups.
- Aloha 9y agoMy use case had to do with migrating a physical machine to a virtualized one, in this case migrating the whole array over (with its controller) was less risk fraught (and notably faster) than creating a new drive, and copying. It also creates an isolation layer between windows and my files. Sometime in the next couple years I'll likely migrate it to a vhdx, but this was quick and easy to setup.
- teilo 9y agoPhysical to VHDX migration is a PITA. I've done it in an emergency, but it's not ideal. You can convert a raw drive image to VHD using the now-obsolete VHDTool, and from there convert to VHDX. But the resulting volume is not dynamic. It appears to have no way to know which sectors are in use when the conversion is done this way, so it assumes all of them are, and the image cannot be shrunk. The better option is to copy all contents to a new VHDX image using a utility instance. A lot more work, of course.
- Aloha 9y agoToo much abstraction there - in this case, I wouldn't convert, I'd copy, create a new VHDX mount it somewhere in the VM, copy the data over, then remount it in the VM at the mountpoint of the now unmounted RAID Array. We ended up here, because as I mentioned, I just moved the RAID into the new box, and mounted at the place the VM needed to have it, that made the setup process much faster.