Mounted VHDX on NAS network share. Is this a bad Idea?

[B1gJ1mmy]

G'day!

I have a windows server box running at home. I have been using this for years as I get access to windows server licences for free through my work. I'm currently running 2019(Not that it matters for this post)

All of my network shares are done via this server. However the network shares are actually hosted on two NAS boxes that are ISCSI Targets used by my server 2019 box. This I know is very convoluted. But it was a necessary evil as my TV recording software(which is on the server also) would not allow recording to network shares and the computer I have windows server on did not have many hard drive bays. So ISCSI was the solution I worked out.

Now for the actual question.

I have another old NAS that I got for a steal on Facebook marketplace. I have it up and running but it does not have ISCSI, Only SMB for interfacing with my server. I would like to move all my recording to this device to free up some space on my other NAS', however I may end up storing some other stuff on there as needed. I want this to to be relatively safe. The NAS box is in a raid 5 configuration With 5x2TB Drives.

What I have done is. I used Hyper V to create a VHDX on the network share hosted on my NAS. I sized this VHDX to take up all of the NAS' capacity. I have then mounted the VHDX on windows server as a hard drive using disk manager so it appears as a normal drive. It seems to work, write speeds are good and read speeds are OK.

What I'm wondering is how safe is this? Is this a viable alternative to ISCSI for my server. I know VHDX files have some sort of corruption protection? But I'm not sure if this sort of setup will cause lots of problems down the track.

Thanks for helping me out.

Sincerely.

The king of over complicated solutions looking for a problem.

 

[sfx2000]

I can't see a reason why it would not work...

Microsoft documents this here...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/pr...ows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/jj134187(v=ws.11)

The one caveat would be the SMB version on the NAS - reading thru the docs, SMB 3.0 seems to be a requirement, but HyperV isn't going to balk at it.

 

[B1gJ1mmy]

Thanks for the Info.

I was able to use hyper v to create the VHDX without issue. I'm not actually using the VHDX with Hyper V. Just used to it create it because its easy.

I have just mounted the VHDX within windows server to use it as storage. It works just fine. Just don't want to commit to storing things on it until I am sure it's reliable.

Buy thanks again I'll do some more reading and see what I can work out.

Thanks.