{"id":9138,"date":"2008-07-24T10:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9138"},"modified":"2008-07-24T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"hyper-v-clusters-there-are-only-26-letters-in-the-alphabet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9138","title":{"rendered":"Hyper-V Clusters &#8211; There Are Only 26 Letters In the Alphabet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve looked at putting Hyper-V in a cluster you might have read Jose Barreto&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.technet.com\/josebda\/archive\/2008\/06\/17\/windows-server-2008-hyper-v-failover-clustering-options.aspx\">blog post on clustering options<\/a>, viewed <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.technet.com\/daven\/archive\/2008\/05\/23\/hyper-v-and-failover-clusters.aspx\">Dave Northey&#8217;s videos<\/a> demonstrating it in action or considered trying to recreate what ESX <em>with<\/em> Virtual Center does.\u00a0 You&#8217;ll soon see that to have failover or mobility on a <em>per-VM<\/em> basis with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, each VM must reside in it&#8217;s on disk\/LUN on your shared storage.\u00a0 Windows Server 2008 doesn&#8217;t have the ability (yet) to do shared file systems like that in ESX&#8217;s VMFS.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll now think &#8230; I can have 16 nodes in a cluster and potentially dozens of VM&#8217;s in my N+1 or N+2 architecture.\u00a0 Wait &#8230; how many drive letters am I going to need?\u00a0 I&#8217;ve already consumed A, B, C and D &#8230; does this mean a cluster can have only 22 VM&#8217;s?\u00a0 This is probably something where some certain-product-fanatic gets to write some blog FUD without digging just a <em>little<\/em> deeper.\u00a0 It&#8217;s amazing to see how prejudice is tainting the commentary and reviews that are out there right now \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>You have the option to use &quot;letterless&quot; drives in Windows Server 2008.\u00a0 Instead of using a drive letter to identify the physical drive that each VM can reside on, you can use a GUID to identify the drives.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p>The only question now is, how do you use these drives?\u00a0 VirtuallyAware has done a <a href=\"http:\/\/virtuallyaware.spaces.live.com\/blog\/cns!549C424F228D6040!189.entry?e19537b0\">post<\/a> on the subject.\u00a0 The hardest part of the process is getting the GUID of the LUN that you&#8217;re working with.\u00a0 Who really wants to type out something nasty like &quot;fc247e42-0a5e-11dd-94db-001b785788b0&quot;?\u00a0 PowerShell helps at there as the blog post indicates.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll now have a virtually unlimited set of drive identifiers that will allow your cluster to scale out to the limitations of your CPU, storage and RAM.<\/p>\n<p>On a tangent, this is just another example of where PowerShell is a necessary skill, not only in PowerShell but in all new MS technologies.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve started learning it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s different, that&#8217;s for sure, but it&#8217;s not optional any longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve looked at putting Hyper-V in a cluster you might have read Jose Barreto&#8217;s blog post on clustering options, viewed Dave Northey&#8217;s videos demonstrating it in action or considered trying to recreate what ESX with Virtual Center does.\u00a0 You&#8217;ll soon see that to have failover or mobility on a per-VM basis with Hyper-V on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9138\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Hyper-V Clusters &#8211; There Are Only 26 Letters In the Alphabet&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}