Vista - Hyper-V Highly Available

Hi all,

If I have 12 VMs on two nodes Windows 2008 x64 Enterprise servers and I
configued it as A/A failover cluster, does that mean that I only need two
service and application group which each group hosts 6VMs (one 6VMs active on
node1 and another 6VMs active on node2 )

What if I go for A/A/A cluster with three nodes, does that mean I need three
service and application groups (which each group hosts 4VMs (one 4VMs active
on node1, one 4VMs on node2 and one 4 VMs on node3)? How do I configure
PREFERRED OWNERS between them? any suggestions?

Thank you!

I'm actually in the process of writing an article on this, which will be
online in a few days.

The trick is to have your virtual machines on separate clustered disks,
when you add a new VM, the cluster service checks at what clustered disk
the virtual machine is hosted. It will create "Service and application
groups' based on what disks these Virtual Machines are found.

Example:

server1
server2

are on iSCSI Cluster Disk 1.

server9
server8

are on iSCSI Cluster disk 2

When creating/importing vm's into cluster manager, it will create two
groups, the first containing server1 and server2, the other containing
server9 and server8.

A mistake that would be easily made would be to expect each VM to be
assignable to a node. Since we are using shared storage, that is of
course not possible. Therefore the groups rather than the machines can
have node affinity.

If you have created separate groups as described above, you'll find that
in the properties of the -groups- it is possible to select a particular
node to be the 'preferred owner'. This way you can 'balance' the usage
of resources on you fail over cluster.

As said: I'll have a more in-depth & details article available soon on
my website. Until then, I hope this explanation answers your question!


/ ) Regards,
/ /_________
_|__|__) Paul Weterings
/ (O_) http://www.servercare.nl
__/ (O_)
____(O_)


John wrote:

Article is up:
http://www.servercare.nl/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=72


/ ) Regards,
/ /_________
_|__|__) Paul Weterings
/ (O_) http://www.servercare.nl
__/ (O_)
____(O_)


Paul Weterings wrote:

Great help and thank you for your efforts to help others.

Quick quesions: The SAN should directly attached host if we do host
clustering?

Thank you.

"Paul Weterings" wrote:

John wrote:
If I understand your question correct: yes. If you intend to cluster
between the VM's the SAN should best be using directly attached to the
VM's. Keep in mind that how you attach storage very much depends on the
application you want highly available. (for example: don't run exchange
2007 on a Hyper-V cluster, but rather cluster two hyper-V VM's running
Exchange as an Exchange CCR cluster..)

I'm not sure what you will be running on the VM's, but just as some
background information: MS has recently posted
(http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...yperV2008.docx)
the results of tests where they reported results of fixed size VHD's to
be quite similar to pass-through storage.

If you're intending to do an Exchange 2007 deployment on Hyper-V and
cluster it: pass-through storage is advised:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc794548.aspx

That will be my next article b.t.w. ;-)

regards,

--

/ ) Regards,
/ /_________
_|__|__) Paul Weterings
/ (O_) http://www.servercare.nl
__/ (O_)
____(O_)

Paul,

Thank you for your expertise and efforts.

Sorry to bother you again with this question:

The general rule for Hyper-V VM highly available is per VM per LUN.

What about VM with lots of drive letters and should we assign more LUNs to
it?

Thank you for your time.




"Paul Weterings" wrote: