Hi,
I have a Dell R710 with 3 x 300GB SAS drives hot plug drives in a raid 5 configuration, on a H700 controller.
This hosts Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V with some non-critical VMs on it for our software testing environment.
Whilst we are in no danger of running out of room on it for the running VMs, we do a daily backup of the VMs, and there isn't enough room directly on the array for the VMS and 1 backup of each VMs, they are subsequently transferred off to NAS storage. We do full VM backups of these "software testing VMs" as we often revisit them shortly after they are made to look at the state of the test at the end of a particular day. The data is not critical, but as we sometimes revisit them the next day, it's a pain to transfer them off server only to bring them back again "The VM shuffle"
What I would like to do is have a separate drive to temporarily hold the backup VMs before transfer. There is no need to have a separate array for this, or increase the existing array, so my thinking is that if I get a 2TB SATA drive from Dell, I can just have a separate dumping ground.
Background out of the way... Now the question!
What is the best way to install the new drive, do I need to shut down the server and do it via the controller card on reboot, or as it is hot-swap - do I just hot plug it and sort it out in windows?
(The new drive would be an official part from Dell)