Default Hyper-V Storage Paths in Windows Server 2012

Here is a small change, which will hopefully have a big impact.

One of our top support call generators with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 is when people run out of space on a system that is running virtual machines.  We have spent a bunch of time looking into this and trying to figure out why this is happening, and what we can do to stop it.

One thing that we identified was that Hyper-V was defaulting to storing new virtual machines on the system drive – which is pretty much the worst option possible.  So in Windows Server 2012, when you enable Hyper-V, we will ask you where you want to store your virtual machines:

paths

A small change, to be sure.  But with any luck, one that save a lot of people from accidentally running out of space.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2012
    Finally! I actually filed a bug on this in the beta for the original version of Hyper-V for Server 2008. It was, of course, closed as "by design".

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    Charlie Russel - Believe it or not, in the past the setup experience was not actually owned by the Hyper-V team (but by the Windows Server Manager team).  We now own it which makes it much easier for us to make sure that the right questions get asked :-) Cheers, Ben