Storage Replica and HyperV physical / passthrough disk

Question

Hi,

I tried to deploy an stretched HyperV cluster with Storage Replica. All is working flawlessly so far, however, I am unable to add an physical/passtrough disk to a HyperV VM after I enable the Storage Replica feature (this is a disk not replicated, or planned to replicate in the future). When I remove the Storage Replica feature, I am able to add the physical/passthrough disk to that VM.

I tried to remove Storage Replica, add the disk to VM, add Storage Replica again just to see the error message "Physical disk not found" in HyperV VM settings.

I expect this to be the behaviour by design, as it looks like the Storage Replica is claiming all disks upon arrival. So could please anybody from Microsoft confirm this?

Is there any chance to selectively exclude some devices/disks from claiming by Storage Replica (for example with specific device id/description through registry) and freeing them to HyperV VM physical disk?

Thank you,

Martin

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P.S.: I have already posted this question on https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-for-it-pro/storage-replica-and-hyperv-physical-passthrough-disk/m-p/2731655, still no replies though.

Answer 1

Hi there,

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 supports the use of pass-through disks for virtual machines. The virtual machine connects directly to a physical hard disk for storage.

Before you begin:

Ensure that the physical hard disk is available. Use Disk Manager to ensure that the physical hard disk is listed as “offline.”

The most important limitation for connecting a pass-through disk to a virtual machine is that it cannot be connected to the virtualization server or to other virtual machines at the same time.

You can get more info from here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/dn803924(v=ws.11)

If you receive any error messages during the process , try following the resolutions as per this article
Known issues with Storage Replica
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-replica/storage-replica-known-issues

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