There's nothing inherent in virtualisation that adds any riskiness to data storage. If you pass through your disks or disk controllers to a VM then it's no different to having the disks attached to a bare-metal OS. I know loads of people who pass their disks through to FreeNAS or OmniOS VMs without any issue.
The major downside with any sort of passthrough is that you lose the portability of the VM, in that you can't have it failover to a backup hypervisor. But this is unlikely to apply to the majority of people in this thread.
Also this:
...is going against your original point, seeing as how with Hyper-V your original Windows host becomes a VM when you install the Hyper-V role.
It does add an extra layer of failure potential, having the VM layer in the way... but it depends on how vital the data stored is, hence my question to the person asking for info.
Such data arrays are potentially quite volatile, so it's not worth the added risk when even bare metal OSes can fail relatively easily depending on the issue at hand.
That's not true re: Hyper-V.
Adding the role keeps the main OS as the main OS.
Hyper-V bare metal is effectively an OS without GUI front end and only command line interface (although there are third party tools, including window's own to manage it from another PC).
The situation you possit is if you install Hyper-V bare metal on a machine and then load a windows OS on top of that.
I want talking only about using windows as a primary VM and adding the Hyper-V role, which is much like installing VM Ware workstation.
Hyper-V VM is closer to VMWare VsPhere/similar... which is what you're talking about.
Any enterprise who uses VMWare or Hyper-V for their primary systems, has a seperate and dedicated NAS where the hard drives are connected directly to the bare metal OS.
If the person isn't too worried about the stbility of the data, then it's OK to experiment.
Thanks for the link, will take a look.
Thanks for the info. Can xpenology can not run any VM. Only looking to run maybe one or two VM (Linux, windows), probably not simultaneously.
Looks like I got a lot of reading to do.
XPEnology does not have the ability to run virtual machines, no.
It can be "bodged"... but requires a reasonable amount of experience/confidence with Linux to do it as it would be a custom installation.
For your needs, FreeNAS might be the best option as it offers a practically native ability to run VMs.
Also, FreeNAS uses a type of file system that is particularly efficient at discovering errors on hard drives... especially useful if you are planning to mix and match drives.
What is the intended use of the VMs that you plan to run? Is there any benefit you will see by running them 24/7 on your "home server" or is it something that might be best served by running on your PC/mac as and when you need it?
The reason I ask is that XPEnology is extremely easy to use and very good at managing fault tolerance... so personally with your possible setup, I would be tempted to keep the HP Gen8 as NAS-only and run the VMs directly on my main PC.
I don't tend to run too many VMs myself... but I have the benefit of a home server as well as my Gen8s which has a six-core intel CPU and 64GB ram... so the VMs go on that (under Hyper-V as I have Win Server 2012 R2 Datacentre).
Otherwise, depending on the need of the VM... I will still run some VMs on my main PC... but then it has a 10-core CPU and 32GB ram... so more than enough to run a few simultaneously.
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