Add a Pass-Through HDD to a VM in Hyper-V using SCVMM 2008.

Here is a quick guide to add a pass-through disk to a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine running on a Hyper-V server using the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The High Availability (Failover Cluster) is not enabled in this setup. The Hyper-V server is connected directly to a Fiber SAN with several free LUN’s.

  1. Add a free LUN to your Hyper-V server. Bring the new physical disk online and initialize it. You don’t have to partition and format the new disk. This will be done inside the VM. When the disk is initialized, bring it offline.
  2. Start SCVMM 2008, go to Virtual Machines and select the VM that will receive the pass-through disk. If the VM is running, shut it down.
  3. Right-click the VM and go to Properties.
  4. Go to the Hardware Configuration tab and add a new virtual SCSI Adapter.
  5. Add a new disk. Select the virtual SCSI Adapter for the Channelsetting and select Pass through to physical drive on host option. From the pull-down menu select the new physical hard disk from step 1 and click on OK.
  6. Power on the VM and logon with your Administrator account.
  7. Go to Storage in Server Manger and create a new volume the same way you would do on a physical machine.

Note: For optimal performance, for each new pass-through disk add a new virtual SCSI adapter.

Cheers!

– Marek.Z

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