Hyper-V using a SAN as an ISCSI target with failover?

[Reapt]

Anyone have experience setting up two Hyper-v core servers, and using a single SAN as the ISCSI drive with a failover Hyper-V box?

I Want to have a hyper-v only box that runs 6-7 Virtuals with the drives on a SAN. If this Hyper-V box was to fail, the other Hyper-v box picks it up. Highly available servers.

Anyone with the experience in the failover part? Setting up the ISCSI target and initiator is no big. Its the failover that gets me.

 

[Lexluethar]

We do something similar with VMware. It's more of a custom solution using Compellent SAN where the datastores live in both locations within a single vCenter. If a host or site fails we have the ability to vmotion to another site with zero down time.

Do you want an automatic failover? If so you need to configure HA within VMware and set affinity rules so that when a Host fails - vmware automatically brings the VM back up on your other Hyper-v. Sorry i know i'm mixing the products up - i know it can be done in vmware i'm just not sure of the steps in Hyper-v.

 

[office politics]

we did it on server 2008 r2 ent. setup the cluster first. use cluster validation tool first. it can be tricky but follow the prompts and conflict suggestions from MS; might be different for core tho. setup cluster vol and witness disk. add HA vms. use hyper-v mgr or scvmm to manage ongoing. i cant remember exactly what the gotcha are with the HA Cluster but something like certain actions should be performed in the Failover cluster instead of the Hyper-v manager cus the changes made in Hyper-v mgr may not crossover to the failover cluster.

 

[Reapt]

We do something similar with VMware. It's more of a custom solution using Compellent SAN where the datastores live in both locations within a single vCenter. If a host or site fails we have the ability to vmotion to another site with zero down time.

Do you want an automatic failover? If so you need to configure HA within VMware and set affinity rules so that when a Host fails - vmware automatically brings the VM back up on your other Hyper-v. Sorry i know i'm mixing the products up - i know it can be done in vmware i'm just not sure of the steps in Hyper-v.

I learned all about vmotion. Nice feature. Only thing is that Vsphere costs money. Hyper-v core is currently free.

thats what i'm trying to figure out. I found some articles saying its possible for failover in hyper-v. Cant really find a good source to see how its done. :/

 

[Reapt]

we did it on server 2008 r2 ent. setup the cluster first. use cluster validation tool first. it can be tricky but follow the prompts and conflict suggestions from MS; might be different for core tho. setup cluster vol and witness disk. add HA vms. use hyper-v mgr or scvmm to manage ongoing. i cant remember exactly what the gotcha are with the HA Cluster but something like certain actions should be performed in the Failover cluster instead of the Hyper-v manager cus the changes made in Hyper-v mgr may not crossover to the failover cluster.

Yeah its a little different on core. I get the virtual hosts up just fine. I just cant seem to get the dang failover to work. I wonder if i can script something in powershell? Other problem is that our client computers are windows 7. Hyper-v manager does not work well or at all on windows 7. We had to buy a third party software and it makes this stuff more complicated it seems... Maybe its worth investing to get windows 8 up and running on at least one of our admin pc's.

 

[office politics]

get-command on the failover cluster module in powershell should list all available commands.

can you connect to the cluster via a client pc using failover cluster mmc snapin? this is prolly a easy way to find event logs for the cluster and find reasons why the failover isn't working.

youtube - MicroNugget: Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtJj7bsbYTU