Hi,
I'm building a new server for a client. The server will host a couple of VMs, everything will be 2012 R2. The server won't be part of a cluster although I may be able to use Hyper-V replica to provide some extra DR/backup beyond standard offsite backups.
I am considering using Storage Spaces in the host, just for the tiering feature. Redundancy will provided by using hardware RAID 1 so I wouldn't be using Storage Spaces mirroring or parity; I just want to be able to keep hot data on SSDs. Normally I would recommend LSI CacheCade for this but it was beyond the budget of the client.
So, here are my questions:
1) I set up a tiered pool, and store the VM VHDXs on the pool. Will tiering be able to work while the VMs are running (if not, I will abandon the idea of using Storage Spaces altogether)
2) One of the VMs will have a deduped file share - will this conflict in anyway with tiering at the host level?
3) I want to use Windows Server Backup to backup the host and guests at 30min intervals to USB connected drives - this has worked well for me since Windows 2008 for single server scenarios. Are there any gotchas with storage spaces / tiered pools that will make this impossible?
4) Will I still be able to use Hyper-V Replica to replicate to another box, without using storage spaces or tiering on the target server?
Thanks for any help.
Aitor