Hyper-V Manager Virtual Server Space

[Harry1980]

Hi All,

 

We recently had a new server installed by a 3^rd party company. We have 1 physical server running Hyper-V Manager running 2 virtual servers. On the physical server we have the C drive and a D drive labelled Virtual Machines which is red indicating that it is low on space. When I log onto the virtual servers, all the drives have plenty of space. Recently the D drive on the host got full and the virtual servers wouldn’t come on. I have noticed that one of the VHD on the virtual servers have been moved to the host server freeing up 100GB on the D drive labelled Virtual Machines which allowed the virtual servers to come on.

 

I just wanted to know if the setup of the virtual server is correct. Shouldn’t they have left more space available for the D drive and not allocate all the space to the virtual servers.

 

How can I overcome this issue? Do I just buy another hard drive and plug it in and add it to the D drive? Is this process difficult to do?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Harry

[Jcx500]

Sounds like the VHDS might be a fixed size causing the space issue on the host

[Harry1980]

That is what I was thinking. How would I resolve this issue?

[Jcx500]

Via Hyper-V manager, Edit disk, select disk then change to dynamically expanding

[Harry1980]

So changing it from fixed to dynamic is possible? When I spoke to the installers they said something different in the lines of redoing the VHDS. The D drive is 1.8TB in size and if I calculate the free space on all the drives it would be around 700-800GB of free space.

[Jcx500]

Im sure you can change from fixed to dynamically expanding , i would take a backup of your vhds first just in case

[msi_school]

Be very careful of dynamically expanding virtual disks, you will run out of space at an inconvenient time at least with fixed size you know where you are.

[Jcx500]

Any chance you could shrink the vhds instead of switching them over to dynamic

[kingoranks]

Hi, why not get them to solve the issue. Im sure they got paid for the setup initially.

[Koldov]

Hopefully someone will tell me if I have got this wrong and I am by no means an expert in Virtual Machines but I just wanted to pick up on a couple of things to help my understanding of your situation...

 

D drive labelled Virtual Machines which is red indicating that it is low on space. When I log onto the virtual servers, all the drives have plenty of space. Recently the D drive on the host got full and the virtual servers wouldn’t come on. I have noticed that one of the VHD on the virtual servers have been moved to the host server freeing up 100GB on the D drive labelled Virtual Machines which allowed the virtual servers to come on.

 

Do you mean one of the Virtual Servers (VHD) has been moved to the C drive? Could you also tell me what you mean by 'I have just noticed'? From your statement it appears that this is either some automatic process, or that someone else in your team has been dealing with this issue. I would be vary wary of messing with anything unless I knew the full facts on how this was configured to work (failovers, clusters etc.) especially if a 3rd party support provider has set it all up...

 

I just wanted to know if the setup of the virtual server is correct. Shouldn’t they have left more space available for the D drive and not allocate all the space to the virtual servers.

 

In my mind if you have a D drive that is set up for Virtual Machines, these are the Virtual Servers/Virtual Drives. If I was setting this up and I had say a 150 GB drive I would create 3 virtual servers with a fixed hard disk size of 50GB each (this would consume the whole drive, whilst the actual 'data' in each servers disk would not)... From a standard server install on each 'virtual disk' you would maybe see 30 GB of free space in each, but the actual drive they were on would still be 'full'.

 

As stated above dynamically expanding disks can grow unnoticed until it is too late, but of course fixed disks can fill up quickly with something running on it like SQL (or my WSUS server which is virtual and I have to keep a close eye on the free space).

Edited January 12, 2022 by Koldov

[Harry1980]

They will most likely say you have to buy more HD and then they will want to charge for for setup/configuration. Which I think is totally wrong. If I had no HD space that's one thing but I have plenty of space.