New home server set up using virtual machines, best practice for shares

[petrefax]

Just bought a new server for home & am trying to work out the best way to set it up so any comments welcome.

Will use server 2008r2 as main OS with a few virtual servers (via hyper-v) running off it. One of which will be windows home server 2011 due to its ease of use for other members of the house (translated as my wife saying "if i can't easily get at music ima kill you")

Server has 1x500gig for OS installs and 4x2tb drives in hardware raid10 for data

Ok, so got a virtual machine with whs11 on it, that's grand, but i want to use the 4x2tb for storage. In order to assign them as a drive for the whs11 vm, they'd be locked to other OSes. But if i set up a virtual drive on the raid for whs, this file is deletable via the main 2008r2 install. (Ok, only i'd be on here & i'd be careful not to, but still....)

What's the best way to set up shares that don't lock the whole raid? Would it be better to install another vm as a fileserver and "remote" from one vm to another for shares?

[Splash]

Will WHS11 use a CIFS share for media? I don't know, not played with it. That said: your concerns about accidentally deleting the VHD/VHDX aren't really mitigated by having a separate VM to host the media.

My experience is more with VMware than Hyper-V, but the way I see it you either pass through the hardware RAID controller to your WHS (in which case it's using all of the disk, and this will depend on the hardware support for this), you have a CIFS share on a VHD/VHDX attached to your WHS11 VM or you put a share on your host server with all the media in and hope that WHS11 can use that as a source. I'd go with the first option.

Also: you're backing this up, right? RAID (and I know, I trot this out every time I see a question like yours but one day someone will listen ) isn't a substitute for a solid backup regime.

[petrefax]

i've actually just gone for option 2 & set up shares on the host machine. i figured if the host machine isn't on, the WHS VM isn't on!

Also: you're backing this up, right? RAID (and I know, I trot this out every time I see a question like yours but one day someone will listen ) isn't a substitute for a solid backup regime.

yeah, good point. i have my old server which i intend chucking a few things at & seeing what i can learn. i'll use that for backups eventually (that's the plan anyway)

[petrefax]

nope, core server folders can't be on mapped drives. ok, maybe option 1 then