Clustering and High Availability Using HyperV

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High availability can be achieved through Failover Clusters and clustering Hyper-V servers. It\'s important to properly configure network and storage resources prior to creating the Hyper-V cluster. In Windows Server 2008 Microsoft® has included a Cluster Validation Wizard that will analyze the hosts and resources prior to creating the cluster.

The Hyper-V Failover Cluster should be created in the following order

Configure physical NICs on both Hyper-V servers

Configure storage resources on both Hyper-V servers

Install Hyper-V role on each servers

Install Failover Cluster feature on both servers

Create the virtual networks used for the Virtual Machines

Validate the cluster configuration

Create the cluster

The networks used for Hyper-V should be configured to separate LAN traffic from iSCSI SAN traffic. To accomplish this, network switches can be completely isolated per network or configured using VLANs.

The type of disks used for Hyper-V can include Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs), pass-through disks, and disks directly connected through the guest OS iSCSI initiator.

When the Hyper-V role is installed, additional Hyper-V performance counters are enabled for Windows Performance Monitor. The Hyper-V counter set is a good start to determine how the Hyper-V server and VMs are performing.

Deploying Hyper-V virtual machines with PS Series storage is similar to provisioning volumes for any application server. The volume must be created and given access to the host so the host can initialize and partition the disk. Once a partition is created on the volume, a VHD can be added and used to host virtual machine files.

Hyper-V Manager is a tool provided to configure and manage the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environment. Once the Hyper-V role has been installed, Hyper-V Manager can be started through Start-All Programs-Administrative Tools menu on the Windows Server 2008 host.

Using Server Manager-Disk Management set the disk online, initialize, and format a partition. Once the disk has a partition and drive letter it can be used to create a new VHD or virtual machine using the Hyper-V Manager - Actions menu.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is a tool Microsoft provides for remote management of virtual server environments. SCVMM can manage multiple virtual environments including VMware ESX environments. In order for SCVMM to communicate correctly with virtual environments, these objects must all be in the same domain with a common administrative account.

Deploying highly available virtual machines with failover clustering requires planning and understanding of the virtual machine responsibilities and workloads. Planning the VM layout is important to determine the storage resources needed for the VMs. Choosing to make the volumes Clustered Shared Volumes or normal cluster volumes can help determine volume size and configuration.

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