Attaching Storage to a Hyper-V Guest within a Failover Cluster

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disk create in hyper-v

I needed to attach some storage to an existing Hyper-V guest operating system. The guest was running in an existing failover cluster. The storage was already provisioned such that it appeared in Failover Cluster Manager | Storage as “Available Storage”. Herein are the steps taken:

  1. Grab the storage path for later use.
    • Start | Administrative Tools | Failover Cluster Manager.
    • Expand Storage, and double-click an available storage item to available free space.
      (Note: validate the available free space for later usage.)
    • Highlight the volume, right-click and select the Copy menu item.
      (Note: best practice is to not assign a drive letter and instead use the \\?\Volume{xyz…} path.)
  2. Make the storage available within Failover Cluster Manager:
    • Under Services and Applications, double-click the guest you want to augment.
    • Within the Actions pane, click the Add Storage link.
    • Check the appropriate checkboxes and click the OK button.
      (Details: the new storage appears under Disk Drives.)
  3. Create the virtual disk using Hyper-V Manager:
    • Within Failover Cluster Manager, assuming the guest is highlighted, click Manage Virtual Machine.
      (Note: this opens Hyper-V Manager.)
    • Within Hyper-V Manager, highlight the guest machine, and click Settings within the Action pane.
    • Start the wizard:
      • If you do not have a SCSI adapter, use Add Hardware | SCSI Controller | Add button.
      • If you already have a SCSI adapter, use SCSI Controller | Harddrive | Add button.
        (Note: If the Add button is grey, you need to shutdown your virtual guest before editing.)
    • Click the Next button.
    • Select Fixed disk (for SQL or transaction servers) or you can thin provision the disk. Click the Next button.
    • Name the new virtual drive and paste the path you saved in step 1 into location. Click the Next button.
      (Note: location must have a trailing slash “\”.)
      (Another note: I prefer not to embed spaces in the volume name.)
    • Define the disk space, make certain its less than the available space from step 1.
    • Click the Finish button.
    • Click the OK button to save changes to your virtual machine.
    • Start the virtual guest and then close the Hyper-V Manager.

The additional disk space has now been allocated to the virtual machine.