Storage Spaces Direct and Virtualization Architecture

I'm trying to figure out the best way to architect a 2 node fail over cluster with the Hyper V role installed. I can really use some input and suggestions from others who have already been down this road.

All in, I have a 4 physical machines with Datacenter 2019 installed on each. On machine 1 and 2 I have installed 1 VM each and clustered them together as a network load balancer. This work great, no problems here.

On machines 3 and 4 I want to create a Storage Spaces Direct Fail Over Cluster. On these 2 machines I also want to virtualize many services in VM's. Sql Server, A File Server, Email Server etc.

What I am not grasping is as follows. Should I create the Storage Spaces Direct Failover cluster on the Host level or at the Hyper-V VM level? Obviously I need the data replicated across both machines should one machine go down.

I am not sure what the best approach here is.

Thanks in advance.


You can do S2D bare metal only. Storage Spaces (Direct) are unsupported inside the VMs (except Azure, but that’s another story to tell).