I'm running W8.1 Pro as a main media server with DP and Scanner, and a Hyper-V host to WHS 2011 as a guest. I originally tried it the other way around, with WHS 2011 as the host, but found it was far too picky about drivers and devices (at least) to be a primary host, plus it had been lobotomized for the home user market with an 8G memory limit. Unbelievable the thinking that goes on at Microsoft sometimes.
Anyway, the configuration I have now is, for the most part, working very well and seems quite stable. I was intending to use Storage Spaces to manage all the drives (15 4T in two pools) until I started reading about all the serious problems that can occur with it. And of course, its lobotomization (is that a word?) with limited GUI management command set available, pushes one into powershell cmdlets, which are powerful, but not particularly clear how to safely use some of them without the chance of error.
So I installed DP and Scanner to manage everything. Now, here's the problem. In W8 at the host level, everything is peachy. But in the guest WHS only physical drives that are taken offline in the host can be 'seen'. So I can use that technique for the WHS system backups on a USB drive and it works fine. But DP doesn't like a defined pool taken offline. It will bring it back online in just a few seconds. That means WHS doesn't have direct access to one of the pools as a physical device. Storage spaces would allow you to take a pool offline for WHS to use.
ATM I can see only two possible ways to deal with this, well three maybe.
1. Use Storage Spaces just for client backups in WHS (9 computers) and just accept the fact that it might crash. You'd lose your accumulated history, but can easily start the sequence over by backing up all computers again right after the defective drive has been replaced (if needed).
2. Use two copies of the SB suite, one for host and one for guest, leaving the WHS pool member drives individually offline in the host. So one SB suite would manage the host media pool and one SB would handle the WHS client pool.
3. (Maybe (because I don't know if this would really work)) define an SB backup pool in the host, and then include it in a Storage Spaces simple pool configuration so it can be taken offline so WHS guest can see it. No idea if the two can safely work together.
The system is pretty robust as an ASUS P87 Plus MB with 32G ram and a core i7 4770k processor at 3.5Ghz. There are 8 built-in AHCI SATA 6G ports on the MB and I'm using two 5 device port multipliers for a total of 16 supported drives, all are Seagate and most are 4T, in ICY-Dock bays. Host has two cores, guest has two cores and both are pretty quick. I need to segregate backup/restore operations for client computers completely from video/audio streaming and photos.
Can anyone suggest some other solution that might solve my problem? There's no real work going on on this system right now, so I'm free to experiment with no penalty.
--Bill