Two-Node Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster: Is it possible use local physical disks in the cluster?

Solution 1:

Failover clusters require shared storage. Without it, if a machine dies, the data on them is inaccessible and there's no way to failover without the data.

I don't believe there is any built in fault tolerant method of using the local drives. For clustered virtual machines, you need shared storage, and internal drives don't qualify.

What you can do, particularly if this is temporary while you are doing SAN maintenance or upgrades, is lose the fault tolerance. If you are using SCVMM, uncheck "Make this virtual machine highly available". If you are using the failover cluster manager, remove the virtual machine from the cluster manager (it will still exist on the physical host). Then use Hyper-V manager to move it to the local storage.

When you do this, you lose the fault tolerance - if a physical host dies, any VMs on that host go with it. You will still be able to use the non-clustered version of live migration to move them between hosts during normal operation - but it will mean moving the disk files too, so will take longer.

When you are done, move their disks back to shared storage and make them highly available again.

Solution 2:

Not much to add here since StarWind and HP VSA are already mentioned! Both products provide great value and do exactly what you're trying to accomplish.

Keep in mind, you won't be able to shuffle the VMs back to local storage if it's already provisioned as storage pool for either HP VSA or StarWind. However, StarWind's storage is always available in loopback mode so you have access to your VMs even during maintenance. Not sure about HP VSA, there is a 3rd voting entity required for the cluster so the maintenance process can get more complicated.

If you have space reserve to shuffle the VMs - you can use Storage Live Migration functionality with any of the storage solutions available on the market.

Solution 3:

StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty much everything you need. Unlike VM-running home-brewed solution GregL was mentioning this particular one is 100% native to Hyper-V as it's Windows app: simple to install and no VM patching mess. + performance. If you're fine with VMs take a look @ HP StoreVirtual VSA. It would be 1TB limited in capacity for their free version and ask for third stand-alone node to install FOM (Windows cluster witness equivalent).