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Deployment of SCVMM with SAN
Deployment of SCVMM with SAN
- Hello!
We're virtualising some of our servers, 9 in fact.
To do this I've got an iSCSI SAN and 3 hosts running server 2008 R2 with hyper-v, I also have an extra server running server 2008 R2 and VMM 2008R2.
I'm wondering how I go about deployment as I don't really want to chop up my storage as I like the idea of VHDs which grow as needed on a big storage appliance whilst not having wasted space on seperate LUNs.
I'd also like to be able to move VMs from one host to another using the VMM server.
So far I've created one big LUN and mapped it as a drive on my VMM... just playing round so far.
Anyone offer me some advice on what the best stratergy would be - if you could include or link to some instructions on how to do it that would be great.
Cheers,
Jonathon
Answers
- Hiya,
You should have a look at the Cluster Shared Volume option of R2.
a few things to consider in your option:
- You will have alot of traffic for that storage, so performance could be an issue.
- Using dynamically expanding disks requires that you are heads up with the fragmentation level of your SAN disk. (could be your SAN already takes care of this internally) also there is a undefined performance loss of running dynamically expanding disks. (due to the fact that chunk size increases with few kb's or so(not like SQL, with % or fixed size that can be changed)
- Some newer versions of SANs are able to only allocate what you need. Even tho you chop up your disks, your actual consumption will only be equal to the actually used. aka overcommitting storage on your SAN.
Top 3 links from search:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_Shared_Volumes - Low level discription
http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/03/02/9453288.aspx - Detailed description
http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/100867/q-how-do-cluster-shared-volumes-work-in-windows-server-2008-r2.html - How to- Marked As Answer byJonathon Moore87 Monday, October 12, 2009 4:06 PM
All Replies
- Hiya,
You should have a look at the Cluster Shared Volume option of R2.
a few things to consider in your option:
- You will have alot of traffic for that storage, so performance could be an issue.
- Using dynamically expanding disks requires that you are heads up with the fragmentation level of your SAN disk. (could be your SAN already takes care of this internally) also there is a undefined performance loss of running dynamically expanding disks. (due to the fact that chunk size increases with few kb's or so(not like SQL, with % or fixed size that can be changed)
- Some newer versions of SANs are able to only allocate what you need. Even tho you chop up your disks, your actual consumption will only be equal to the actually used. aka overcommitting storage on your SAN.
Top 3 links from search:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_Shared_Volumes - Low level discription
http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/03/02/9453288.aspx - Detailed description
http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/100867/q-how-do-cluster-shared-volumes-work-in-windows-server-2008-r2.html - How to- Marked As Answer byJonathon Moore87 Monday, October 12, 2009 4:06 PM
- Thanks Jesper, that's great... Unfortunately I seems to have run into a problem whist virtualising the first of my servers;
Started a new-P2V of a 2003 server... all seems to go fine until it gets to the copy hard disk / deploy file using BITS over https
at which point the process seems to get stuck and the time remaining starts going up, this always happens when the amount of data transfered is at exactly 2GB, everything upto this point seems to have gone fine.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Jonathon Sorted... Was to do with a load balancing problem on the SAN...
Cheers guys- you are not using cluster to host your VMs ?
- I'd like to, do you know how I set my physical servers as a cluster?
- You can use StarWind for building balanced and failover SAN. Look here for details: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/SAN-High-Availability .
You can try StarWind products for free: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/free I'd like to, do you know how I set my physical servers as a cluster?
Hiya,
You can use the Failover Clustering feature in Windows server 2008.
Its pretty simple and straight forward.
Unless your talking NLB cluster, in which you can use the Network Load Balancing feature of Windows server 2008 also.I'd like to, do you know how I set my physical servers as a cluster?
Go here,
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=518d870c-fa3e-4f6a-97f5-acaf31de6dce&displaylang=en
and download the step-by-step guide on how to setup a failover cluster.
In windows 2008 , it is really straight forward, as long as it passes the cluster validation, you are pretty much there.- Cool, I'm going to try this tonight... Do you know if there's a way to dedicate a nic to iSCSI without having completely seperate network equipment (switch etc)?
- Just exclude the connection within the cluster, so cluster doesn't use it. Setup the cluster and you will see it.
