I have Hyper-V VMs (main application server 2008 R2 on IBM and MSSQL on DELL), both virtualized in Hyper-V 2012. I have discovered some performance offset when using virtualized OS (Terminal server) and I would love to use the physical servers full power. SO after some reading, I wanted to compare the performance of virtualized local machine, to machine with OS booted from SAN directly. I believe when booting from SAN, after some hardware tweaks and adding some redundant hardware, I could get solid and expandable system. However I have a OS on VHDX from hyper V, which has plenty of informations, settings, tweaks, and I would love to transfer / migrate this OS as it is to a LUN on SAN, and boot server directly from that. I managed to connect targets, initiators, server BIOS can connect and boot from SAN, but I guess simly pointing iSCSI Target to my Hyper-V VHDX is not the way how it should be done (there must be some MBR, or iSCSI drivers missing, as I get a blue screen when windows try to boot) I could not find any information about this migration or process anywhere(some sort of easy one). If anybody can help to accomplish this would be great. Maybe my solution I am trying to reach is not the best from somebody point of view, but I would still love to test and compare the difference in performance I can get out of the hardware physical/virtualized hardware. (I am thinking of booting OS from SAN, as later I want to add second fail over Server X3850 X5, and connect them with QPI, and use as one powerfull machine, plus to centrally manage snapshots of whole OS, data etc...thanks for any comments and help.
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If you want to boot from a remotely-stored VHDX, that would need to be accomplished by either storing it on an SMB3 share (windows supports booting hardware from a VHDX, not sure whether that can be over SMB though), or with the VHDX being the back-end storage for a Microsoft iSCSI target. I strongly suspect you'll end up needing a fresh OS install to be able to get a boot-from-SAN config functioning though.– JimNimJul 31, 2015 at 7:54
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Hi Jim, thank you for reply.I am doing a baby steps now for future solution : a single node (2physical) server which will hold a Terminal Server.At the moment I have 1node 1server,with SSD disks,with hyper-v holding VHD with my Application server.however I have found limitations of this configuration for expanding,and believe the Hyper-V is including some latency to the system.so I would love to have the servers booted from central SAN, use their full power,and have flexibility with data management on SAN.however I have no idea if that is OK(I have found many load balancing topologies for TS.– JozefSep 1, 2015 at 20:31
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,...Anyway, if I decide to go with your solution 2 :New OS installed to SAN" is there any tool, to transfer all user data, programs, settings, ....all the little regedit changes I did since first installation, etc? I can just do all the little tweaks again. Looking forward your kind reply.Jozef– JozefSep 1, 2015 at 20:36
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