Monday 27 January 2014

Windows Server 2012 R2 - Virtual hard disk sharing limitations

There is quite a lot written about how good the new "virtual harddisk sharing" feature is in Windows Server 2012 R2, and I agree that it is very good feature but there is not as much written about the limitations. When you enable the function it says "Some virtual machine and virtual hard disk features will be disabled when this setting is enabled". Already known limititations and already published on other blogs are:
  • You cannot do host-level backups of the guest cluster.  This is the same as it always was.  You will have to install backup agents in the guest cluster nodes and back them up as if they were physical machines.
  • You cannot perform a hot-resize of the shared VHDX.  But you can hot-add more shared VHDX files to the clustered VMs.
  • You cannot Storage Live Migrate the shared VHDX file.  You can move the other VM files and perform normal Live Migration

There are also some limitations for virtual machines managed by VMM:
  • You cannot create a checkpoint on a virtual machine that has shared virtual hard disks.



  • You cannot change properties of a virtual machine with shared virtual hard disks.


However you can change properties of a virtual machine managed by VMM with powershell.

1 comment:

  1. how to uncheck share virtual hard disk using powershell

    ReplyDelete