If you like me have little experience with Hyper-V, Clustering and iSCSI, then you will appreciate how much “fun” we can have in getting it all working. Thankfully, I stumbled across this blog post from Ben Armstrong and a further blog from Aidan Finn with detailed step by step guide on how to use the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target to create a Hyper-V cluster.
If you need to get into iSCSI and Hyper-V Clustering then check out these two guys blogs – there’s a heap of good information there.
One thing that must be clearly noted in all of this Wayne is that these articles are NOT for a production environment.
We have done plenty of testing with iSCSI and were not impressed with the speeds achievable on Gigabit iSCSI and therefore, run either 10GbE if it has to be iSCSI or Fibre in our clients to do any sort of clustering.
The overheads of 10GbE iSCSI need to be factored in to any clustering as well as where do you draw the line of a single point of failure. For a 2 server cluster… 2x10GbE Switches @ $4kea~ 4x10GbE Network Cards @ $1k~ ea…. you’ve just blown $12k on networking before you’ve even spent a cent on your server infrastructure.
Hyper-V HA/Failover takes lots of thinking and lots of planning. The above articles certainly provide some great tips and for a play environment gives you some good experience to implement in the real world.
Greg
Good point Greg – personally – I’m doing this to learn and I’ve not done heavy stress testing of it. I do recognise that a production environment will need more than my little ML110 as it’s Hyper-V host 🙂
While I don’t recommend software iSCSI for production, I also don’t expect the needs of an SBS environment to require 10gigE. Dedicated storage networks with high quality components sure… And proper configuration of course.