OK … it is a single node cluster 🙂 But it is running! Live Migration is great and all but to be honest, the 2 things I want out of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V are Core Parking (to reduce our power bill) and Cluster Shared Volume. I really, really hated having to do per-LUN deployment of VM’s on the cluster. They stressed me out when it came to alterations or deletions. Luckily, I’d settled on a consistent naming standard for every component in the W2008 cluster. But still, one oversight and bang – a production VM goes off the air. With CSV, you deploy your storage once and add to it as required later. Love that!
Setting up CSV was easy. I set up a LUN in the SAN management console. I linked this to the cluster node(s). I initialised it and brought it online with the GPT disk partition system. This is optimised for LUN’s over 2TB in size. Our CSV will keep on growing so 2TB will be nothing. I did a quick format and labelled the disk as CSV1. I did not add a letter to the drive because there was no point.
Next I added the storage to the cluster. I renamed it as CSV1. I enabled CSV in the cluster (select the cluster, centre pane, it’s a hyperlink in there). The MMC refreshed and now I had a Cluster Shared Volume item in the navigation pane on the left. I selected this and added storage: I selected the disk I’d just added to the cluster. Badda bing, a CSV was created!
The disk is now mounted as C:ClusterStorageVolume1. Additional CSV’s would be Volume2, Volume3, etc.
Now, I can add VM’s into the CSV. Note that any VM that was on the disk before being converted to CSV will be “corrupted", i.e. their storage location will have changed so Hyper-V no longer knows where they are. Make sure there are no VM’s created on the disk before you convert it to a CSV.
I’ve also added 2 patches for W2008 R2 that I’ve blogged about recently. 1 is related to Nehelem processors and the other is related to power management, i.e. Core Parking.
That’s it! Next I need to build node 2 and add it to the cluster. Then I get to try out Live Migration!
You’ll love it. We’ve got two seperate clusters running in production now for 8 weeks (DELL R710’s) and are very happy. We’ve got 4 CSV’s per cluster to spread the risk and those LUN’s come from two seperate EVA’s. Just in case we have an issue with the storage we’ve spread the risk. Good talking to you @ Tech Ed 2009 Berlin by the way.
Wow, that’s some setup!
It is very sweet. You’re use of and experiences with System Center Operations Manager en Virtual Machine Manager contributed to us evaluating it in the lab and we’re very happy with it. We recently got our licenses for use in our Hyper-V environment, the data center edition pricing became only available here last month. So good times ahead on that front as well.
Definitely! When used with 2008 R2 Hyper-V, VMM is a great time saving tool.