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Supported Service Failover options in Hyper-V VM machines
Supported Service Failover options in Hyper-V VM machines
- I have three blade servers with Fiber Channel connections to a SAN. They run Windows 2008 Enterprise, and are all in a Hyper-V cluster, so my VM's can be highly available.
I also have a service that needs to be highly available, actually several, and they run in a VM. VM's need maintenance, like OS maintenance, and software upgrades, so I would like to create a failover cluster (Guest Cluster) for these services, and the IP Address used to address them. I'd like two VMs on different blade servers to be the other cluster node, so if one blade fails, the service will still be available, and if the primary VM needs service, I can make the other the active node.
I understand I can do this with an iSCSI SAN to provide the quorum and any shared data disk. But unfortunately, the physical SAN we have only supports Micro Channel.
a) If I buy an iSCSI SAN, will this be a supported production environment?
b) Is there any option for me to make this work in a highly available way without an iSCSI SAN purchased?
Thanks for any advice on this.
Answers
- Does the service rely on any data that needs to be shared between the nodes? If not, you can just implement a Node and File Share Majority quorum and skip iSCSI completely. If you need to share data between the two systems, another alternative is to use failover cluster integrated host based replication to keep the data in sync between the two systems. One of the host based replication solutions includes SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, from my company.
David A. Bermingham, Director of Product Management, SteelEye Technology- Marked As Answer byTim Quan - MSFTMSFT, ModeratorMonday, November 09, 2009 2:15 AM
- The Node+Fileshare model (aka FSW) is available in 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2.
Visit my blog about multi-site clustering - http://msmvps.com/blogs/jtoner- Marked As Answer byTim Quan - MSFTMSFT, ModeratorMonday, November 09, 2009 2:14 AM
All Replies
- Does the service rely on any data that needs to be shared between the nodes? If not, you can just implement a Node and File Share Majority quorum and skip iSCSI completely. If you need to share data between the two systems, another alternative is to use failover cluster integrated host based replication to keep the data in sync between the two systems. One of the host based replication solutions includes SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, from my company.
David A. Bermingham, Director of Product Management, SteelEye Technology- Marked As Answer byTim Quan - MSFTMSFT, ModeratorMonday, November 09, 2009 2:15 AM
- Hi,
besides FC or iSCSI you can use SAS in a Blade environment. For example HP is offering SAS Switches for their Blade infrastructure which can be connected to an SAS storage for example msa 2000 series. This configuration is supported by server 2k8.
One point I am struggeling about is "the service will be still available". This is a fault tolerance configuration not high availabilty; see Haward Research Group definition of availability. To achive this, everrun from marathon is a good solution.
Hope this helps.
Thorsten
ThorstenWujek - Thanks, I will research the File Share Majority quorum option. Do you know if this an option in Windows Server 2008, or only in Windows Server 2008 R2?
- The Node+Fileshare model (aka FSW) is available in 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2.
Visit my blog about multi-site clustering - http://msmvps.com/blogs/jtoner- Marked As Answer byTim Quan - MSFTMSFT, ModeratorMonday, November 09, 2009 2:14 AM
