Tip of the Day: Storage Failure Detection

Today’s Tip…

Starting in Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V has been enhanced to detect physical storage failures on storage devices that are not managed by Windows Failover Clustering (SMB 3.0 file shares). Storage failure detection can detect the failure of a virtual machine boot disk or any additional data disks associated with the virtual machine. If such an event occurs, Windows Failover Clustering ensures that the virtual machine is relocated and restarted on another node in the cluster. This eliminates situations where unmanaged storage failures would not be detected and where virtual machine resources may become unavailable.

Unlike the network failure detection mentioned in a previous tip, there are no user interfaces (either GUI, PowerShell or WMI) as a result of this enhancement.  The only noticeable difference for users is that storage failure is handled more effectively by Hyper-V and failover clustering.