Virtual Disk to install SQL 2016 on premise for Sharepoint 2019 On Premise

Question

Hi All,

My customer has 2 host servers both running HyperV and formatted as NTFS 4K cluster size. They have existing Exchange & file server running on virtual disk also formatted as NTFS 4K cluster. They want to installed Sharepoint 2019 on premise which also require SQL 2016 on premise.

My Qs

1. You cannot create a virtual disk NTFS with 64K cluster when the physical disk is already NTFS 4K cluster. Is this correct?
2. Can customer create a new volume (f:) and formatted as NTFS albeit 64K cluster from the few Tb left?
3. Another option is to buy another disk and add to host which will be formatted as NTFS or ReFS 64K cluster?
4. Which option 2 or 3 is better & why? Customer prefer not to buy more HW.
5. Windows Server 2016 license allows a max of 2VMs? Is this true?

Many Thanks for your attention.

Answer 1

1. That's not true. You can format the VDisk file system in any format with any supported cluster size.
2. If partitioned, yes.
3. Sure; ReFS is best for Hyper-V.
4. 3 is going to be the most likely; if the disk you plan to allocate a new volume to isn't partitioned today and has no free space on the volume, you won't be able to shrink it and partition it. This also may require 3rd party disk partitioning utilities.
5. Standard provides you with 2 Windows licenses for VMs. Data Center allows for unlimited Windows VM installs.

What I would talk to the customer about is performing a backup of all VMs, format the disks on Hyper-V as that cluster size isn't appropriate for VMs, then restore the VMs. That will save on hardware costs but will require downtime of the Hyper-V server.