Aidan Finn, IT Pro

This is something that struck me today.  I was doing some checks in Operations Manager to see what free space was like on some of the servers we run online backup services with.  Then I thought – let’s have a look at the cluster shared volume on our Hyper-V cluster.  The problem is that Operations Manager deals with logical drives that have a letter.  It seems to ignore drive such as the CSV: a mounted drive that appears as a folder in C:\ClusterStorage\Volume 1, Volume2, etc.

There are two ways to check this manually that I have found so far.  The first is to open up the Failover Clustering MMC and connect to the cluster.  You’ll see the size and free space for the Cluster Shared Volume there. 

You can also do it in VMM by right-clicking on the cluster object and viewing the properties.

You can ignore the witness disk (at the top); I really hope you’re not so desperate for VM storage that you consider that!

I cannot find anything in Operations Manager for tracking this critical function.  It’s not in the Failover Clustering MP (where it probably should be), Hyper-V or VMM management packs.

I’d advise that you keep an eye on this, especially if you are experiencing growth or using self service in VMM.  For example, I’ve switched to using dynamic VHD’s.  Yeah, early on that means I save on storage space.  My C: VHD’s are half the size they were with Windows Server 2008 fixed VHD’s.  But eventually they will grow and consume space on the CSV.  You need to know when to trigger a growth of the LUN on the SAN and expand the NTFS volume before we reach critical levels.  Bad things happen when a growing VHD doesn’t have any space left.

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