Vista - Hyper-V without SAN

Hello,

We are planning to migrate to MS Server 2008 platform and take advantage of
virtualization and failover clustering. The two primary server applications
we want to virtualize into a highly available cluster are Exchange 2010 and
ISA 2006. Although we plan on using four physical servers to accomplish
failover, some research shows that storage for the VM's needs to be shared
on a common external storage array.

For example, to virtualize Exchange server using two physical machines (each
with internal HD storage), do you have to have a separate external shared
storage or SAN to have both Exchange servers operate in a failover cluster?
Can we logically share storage using the server's internal HD?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Curtis

Currently Hyper-V does not support SCSI-3 persistant reservations on it's
virtual SCSI devices so you can't use them for a "cluster in a box" on 2008.
However any current hardware SCSI device (i.e. 2 or more controllers
attached to a bunch of disks in some way or another) will work fine.
Also iSCSI software like StarWind can be run on the local machine if you
want to use non-SCSI disks (this is what I'm doing.)
Anoying but not the end of the world.

"Curtis Brown" <support@newsgroup> wrote in message
news:72743F14-B81D-40C4-A75F-3E6B76397FEF@newsgroup

I've used Starwind's iSCSI software with good success to build a failover
cluster. I've used it on a base of 32-bit Windows Server 2k3, and a 64-bit
Windows Server 2k8. Both worked well, though the 2k8 was faster. But the
underlying hardware was faster, so that's not surprising.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/, and they have good step-by-step
walkthroughs that make the whole thing quite simple, really.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel


"Curtis Brown" <support@newsgroup> wrote in message
news:72743F14-B81D-40C4-A75F-3E6B76397FEF@newsgroup

On Aug 17, 6:11*pm, "Curtis Brown" <supp...@newsgroup>
wrote:iSCSI targets are one solution, however, if you are going to the
trouble of making your servers highly availble, shouldn't you also
make you storage highly available? You should look into host based
replication solutions such as SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition that
will allow you to use your internal storage in a WSFC cluster and
simply keep the local disk in sync across your network. This
configuration has two benefits: it eliminates the shared storage as a
single point of failure and it also allows you to make use of the
local attached storage you already have in your servers.

Here is a video demonstration of DataKeeper and Windows Server
Failover Clustering working together to cluster Hyper-V VMs without
the need for shared storage.

http://www.steeleye.com/downloads/vi...sfc/index.html

You can request a 30-day evaluation at http://www.steeleye.com/eval/

On Aug 25, 7:21*pm, "Steve Buckley" <mrnecros(remove-this)
@hotmail.com> wrote:Here is my blog post that talks about some things to consider to when
deploying iSCSI storage for high availability clusters.

http://clusteringformeremortals.word...-link-goodbye/