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AnswerFailover cluster and drive letters

  • Sunday, April 13, 2008 11:32 PMJaap WesseliusMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    Hi,

    when building a large failover cluster you run pretty quickly out of drive letters. For failover flexibility i want to place one VM on one LUN so this is challenging when creating an 8 node cluster (all Dell PE2950 with 32 GB RAM).

    Placing the LUN's in a mount point configuration is not really an option because you have to failover the all mount points that are mounted to the same (small) LUN.

    How about using the drive GUIDs? Format the LUN but don't assign a drive letter. Using the mountvol utility you can find the GUID of the disk like \\?\Volume{9e1a9524-0649-11dd-84f3-001d090f5990}\

     

    I can access this, place my VHD on it and create a VM using this GUID notation. But when I go to Failover Cluster Management and configure the VM using the High Availability Wizard I get this error message:

     

    The path '\\?\Volume{9e1a9524-0649-11dd-84f3-001d090f5990}\Hyper-V\Win2003Std-X86' where the virtual machine configuration is stored is not on a failover cluster and might not be highly available. To achieve the highest availability, store the virtual machine configuration on a clustered file server (configured within a failover cluster).

     

    When I assign a drive letter to the same volume all goes well and I can move this volume across all nodes in the cluster.

     

    My question is: will this GUID configuration work in a cluster environment, is it supported by Microsoft or am I missing something?

     

    Thanks,

    Jaap Wesselius

     

Answers

  • Wednesday, April 16, 2008 3:23 PMJaap WesseliusMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
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    As I've understood both in the Failover Clustering forum as well as from Microsoft consultants there's a bug in Hyper-V which is causing this behaviour. It is under investigation and should be fixed soon.

    I'll post an update when it is fixed.

     

    Regards

    Jaap

     

     

     

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  • Monday, April 14, 2008 5:08 AMMatthew MattoonMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    Hi Jaap,

     

    This is an interesting question, and I too would be curious to know the answer.  However this forum is probably not best suited for this question (as virtualization is a very small component in the environment you described).  This would be better suited for the Server 2008 Failover Clustering forum.  You can find that here:

     

    http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=827&SiteID=17

     

    -matt
     
  • Monday, April 14, 2008 1:52 PMJaap WesseliusMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    Hi Matt,

     

    I haven't thought of it that way, but I guess you're right. This might not be a Hyper-V issue (although Hyper-V is not working as well) but indeed a failover clustering issue.

    I'll try a posting overthere.

     

    THanks,

    Jaap

     

     

     
  • Tuesday, April 15, 2008 12:11 AMMike Sterling [MSFT]MSFT, OwnerUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    This scenario should work, as I've set it up for my own internal use. Did you place both the VHD as well as the configuration files on the shared volume?

     

     
  • Tuesday, April 15, 2008 12:15 AMJaap WesseliusMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    Yes, I placed everyting on the shared volume. The strange thing is that it works like a charm using a drive letter and when changing to GUID's it just fails. And besides the message described above it's not really saying anything.

    I'm at the MVP Summit right now so much time to test this week though.I'll try to figure out next week when I'm home.

     

    Cheers

    Jaap

     

     

     
  • Wednesday, April 16, 2008 3:23 PMJaap WesseliusMVPUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
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    As I've understood both in the Failover Clustering forum as well as from Microsoft consultants there's a bug in Hyper-V which is causing this behaviour. It is under investigation and should be fixed soon.

    I'll post an update when it is fixed.

     

    Regards

    Jaap