I tried that, setting a 2nd drive that is Auto location and VirtIO bus.  But when I restart the VM I don't see any other drives, even if I go into disk management.  There doesn't seem to be any place where I can even install the VirtIO drivers.

I tried that, setting a 2nd drive that is Auto location and VirtIO bus.  But when I restart the VM I don't see any other drives, even if I go into disk management.  There doesn't seem to be any place where I can even install the VirtIO drivers.

You need to go to device manager first and install the driver first.  It will be listed as a SCSI Device.  Once you do that the drive should be visible in disk manager.  I just tried that with my WHS2011 VM and it works other than it complaining I'm past the activation period so I will have to reinstall it for further testing.  But when I rebooted I had two physical drives listed as "Red Hat VirtIO SCSI Disk Device"s in device manager and I could boot.  So try it.  I think it will work for you.

Got it - I was able to install the drivers and then after rebooting I had to go to Disk Management to initialize and format the disk.

 

Will these disks that I have in my WHS VM, and there are now three of them, be visible to the rest of my unRAID system?

 

I kind of have a wasted 100GB since the install requires 160GB but then it changes the C: system drive to 60GB.  So the rest of the 100GB was created as D: but it isn't big enough to do anything else.  This new drive that I jsut created is 1TB which should be enough for client backups.

 

If I need it to be bigger can I resize it to more than 1TB or am I stuck with that size now?

 

Actually it turns out hat I am going to have to do that myself as I stupidly create the second disk with a size of 1GB when I meant to do 1TB.

Got it - I was able to install the drivers and then after rebooting I had to go to Disk Management to initialize and format the disk.

 

Will these disks that I have in my WHS VM, and there are now three of them, be visible to the rest of my unRAID system?

If you share them they would be visible.  Otherwise only the image file would be visible in your unRAID file system if it is in a shared folder on unRAID.

I kind of have a wasted 100GB since the install requires 160GB but then it changes the C: system drive to 60GB.  So the rest of the 100GB was created as D: but it isn't big enough to do anything else.  This new drive that I jsut created is 1TB which should be enough for client backups.

 

If I need it to be bigger can I resize it to more than 1TB or am I stuck with that size now?

 

Actually it turns out hat I am going to have to do that myself as I stupidly create the second disk with a size of 1GB when I meant to do 1TB.

You can resize the image file.  There are instructions in the Wiki - probably.  Or in the forums in a post.  I don't remember what they are so can't help you there.  Once the image is bigger you will have to go into windows and expand the partition in Disk Manager - also something I haven't done in a long time so no help here either - sorry.

 

I just realized you probably don't have anything on the drives yet so you could just delete them (excluding the boot drive of course) and then recreate the drive in the proper size.  Would be faster than trying to expand but does loose all data on the drive.

Got it - I was able to install the drivers and then after rebooting I had to go to Disk Management to initialize and format the disk.

 

Will these disks that I have in my WHS VM, and there are now three of them, be visible to the rest of my unRAID system?

If you share them they would be visible.  Otherwise only the image file would be visible in your unRAID file system if it is in a shared folder on unRAID.

Clarifying a little. You would need to share them in windows. In unraid, they are just single files that encompass the whole virtual disk. When they are mounted in the windows VM, you can share them and the contents will be available via \\windowsvm\share, NOT \\unraid\share

Thanks guys.  It is true that there isn't anything on the disks yet, except for the system disk and even just installing and doing all of the upgrades takes quite a while.  I don't want to be wasting space but I am not sure how much room I will need for backing up 7-8 clients.  They are all Win 7 or Win10 so presumably there are lots of duplicate files and WHS is suppsoed to be smart enough to handle this.  What I will do for now is to start out with a couple of clients and see how it goes.

I would just use the 100GB D drive as an install drive still lots of wasted space but then you would separate your backup img drive from your boot drive.  Might help if you have to reinstall again.  Does with WHSv1 anyway with real disks.  I just backup with BDBB first then reinstall then run BDBB to restore and I have my backups in a new install again.

Cool, I was never aware of BDBB.

Vdisks are sparse, ie, they only use the actual used size, not the allocated, you can see that by clicking on the VM name, it's also there you can expand a vdisk.

Cool, I was never aware of BDBB.

Just want to point out the BDBB may not be available for WHS2011.  I use WHSv1 which I know it is compatible with.

Perhaps not, but I am not too fussed about making backups of my backups.  Assuming that I can do client restores properly from WHS 2011 then I am good - if I lost my backups then I could always just back up all clients again.  I am trying my first client backup and it seems very slow for some reason, hopefully it picks up.

 

@Johnnie - thanks that is good to know that it is easy to resize these virtual disks.  There is one issue however - it looks like these vdisks are currently going on my cache drive which is only a 250GB SSD.  How do I have them not use the array drives rather than the cache?

If you want to use a specific disk just copy the vdisk to that disk (using cp if you want to keep it sparse) then edit the VM and change the vdisk location, eg, /mnt/disk3/VMs/vdisk.img

So I guess I should have selected Manual and created the vdisk on disk 3, correct?  I may still do that as there isn't anything on this disk yet.

 

My first backup failed with Event ID 8194 Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error querying for the IVssWriterCallback interface.  hr = 0x80070005, Access is denied. This is often caused by incorrect security settings in either the writer or requestor process.

 

So I may have some other issue to solve.  This server is Win10 and I think I remember that you had to make some edits to be able to backup Win10 clients.

Something isn't right.  Here is the XML for my disks.  When it creates vdisks it is using /mnt/user/domains.  But when I browse my drives that is on my cache drive.  I don't want this on disk3 as that has lots of free space.  So shouldn't the source file be /mnt/disk 3/domains?

 

My setting for the domain share has use cache set to prefer.  Should I change this to No?

 

The other weird this is that when I go to add another virtual disk the size box doesn't always show up.

 

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
      <source file='/mnt/user/domains/WHS2011/vdisk1.img'/>
      <backingStore/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='ide'/>
      <boot order='1'/>
      <alias name='ide0-1-0'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='1' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>
    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
      <source file='/mnt/user/domains/WHS2011/vdisk2.img'/>
      <backingStore/>
      <target dev='hdd' bus='virtio'/>
      <alias name='virtio-disk3'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>

Manually chose the location, eg, /mnt/disk3/Folder