Using the Hot Add of VHDs in Hyper-V R2

Overview
Procedure

Overview

With the increased use of virtual environments comes the need to add VHDs (HD file extension used by virtual) in a virtual servers, the same procedure called Hot swap in physical environments. Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2 is possible do this operation without need of a specific hardware. This sometimes is not a problem, but until then it was necessary to shut down the Virtual Machine (VM) to do this. You will see how the Hyper-V R2 helps put more HDs with VMs in production, without impacting your environment, as well as is done in the physical environment.

Procedure

Open the hyper-v Manager clicking start > Administrative Tools > Hyper-V Manager. Click OK in the user account control message to elevate your credentials as an administrator.

Click the virtual machine that you want to add the virtual disk and soon after click Settings on the right side of the screen, as Figure 1.

Figure 1 – virtual machine settings

Then click SCSI controller, hard drive, and then click Add.

Figure 2 – Adding a Storage SCSI

Note that you cannot add a Storage IDE, only SCSI and pass-through Disks.

Choose the .vhd file path or the physical disk that you want to add. HD physical, called pass-through disk, must be offline in physical machine. In the example below was used a dynamic vhd with 20 GB in size.

Figure 3 – vhd path

After you have clicked Ok, open disk management of your virtual machine and already you can view the new disk available.

Figure 4 – virtual machine disk

The disc already appears as online and now you can create new partitions and volumes. In the case of physical disks you can even create RAIDs fault tolerance. To remove it just open virtual machine settings, click Settings and removes SCSI.