Part 4: Configure MS Failover and Hyper-v clustering

To manage the core servers’ clustering abilities through a management console, you will need

the failover clustering feature added to a Windows 2008 r2 full (non-core) server or a

Windows 7 enterprise workstation with remote administration tools installed. In my case, my

existing management station is already Windows 2008 R2 so I will use it.

1. Install Failover Clustering

a. From Control Panel, click ‘Programs and Features’

b. Click ‘Turn Windows Features on or off’

c. Select ‘Features’ from the left pane

d. Click ‘Add Features’ from the right pane

e. Select Failover Clustering and click install

2. Run the Failover Cluster Manager

a. Logon to your chosen Management workstation

b. Go to Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Failover Cluster Manager

3. Validate a Configuration

a. From the Failover Cluster Manager, in the middle of the centre pane click the

‘Validate a Configuration ‘ link

b. Click next on the welcome screen

c. On the Select Servers page, add all the servers that you wish to join to your

cluster

d. Click ‘next’ once you have added all your servers

e. Choose to ‘Run’ all tests and click Next

f. Click Next on the Confirmation page

g. The test will take some time to complete

i. The warning about disconnections to storage relate to the shared

volumes only.

h. View the report and address any outstanding issues, if any, before continuing.

i. You will see the View Report button on the Summary page near the lower right

j. Review and address any noted warnings or errors before continuing

4. Create the Cluster

a. From the Failover Cluster Manager tab, click Create a Cluster

b. Click Next on the welcome page

c. On the Select Servers tab, add all the servers that passed the cluster validation

wizard in the previous step

d. Select a name for your cluster and click next

e. Review the confirmation dialog and click next to create.

f. Review the Summary tab and note any warnings.

5. Create the Cluster Shared Volumes

Now that the failover cluster is created we can create over CSVs for the Hyper-v

servers to use.

a. From the Failover Cluster Manager tab, click Manage a cluster

b. Enter the name of your newly created cluster and click ok

c. Highlight your cluster name in the Left pane, and in the right pane, click

‘Enable Cluster Shared Volumes…’

d. Once enabled, right click ‘Cluster Shared Volumes’ from the left pane and

select ‘Add Storage’

e. You should see both of the Virtual Disks created earlier on the SAN – add both,

one at a time calling them Volume1 and Volume2 respectively

f. Once added, highlight ‘Cluster Shared Volumes’ and the centre screen should

look similar to this;

g. Notice that the location on your system drive where the CSVs have mapped

your shared SAN storage.

i. You can also see which node is considered the current owner.

**Note: At a file system level, you should only ever add or remove data

through the current CSV owner and no other member nodes. Do so with

extreme caution as well.

h. Setup of the Nodes and CSV is complete, we can now move on to setting up our

Hyper-v cluster

Set up the Hyper-v cluster using SCVMM

Using a Hyper-v cluster provides greater availability than running standalone Hyper-v servers.

If one server fails, other servers in the cluster will take control over any running VMs that

were on the failed node, providing virtually uninterrupted service (a couple of seconds for

transition). This reason alone obviously is the most common and understandable justification

for the added complexity required in establishing a cluster. At this stage you can now run a

highly available Hyper-v cluster and manage it by utilizing both the failover cluster manager

and Hyper-v manager together, running on a management workstation.

Another great advantage of Hyper-v clustering comes to light when using System Center

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) - Live Migration ability. With this functionality you

can actively move running VMs from one host to another with virtually no loss in connectivity

to the running VM (a few seconds at most). This functionality greatly improves the ability to

perform maintenance on nodes, as well as monitor and adjust resource allocation on the fly

between the nodes for optimal performance. If you have System Centre Operations Manager

2007 sp1 (SCOMM) or later, you can even further expand upon this advantage and improve

performance tuning even further (not covered in this article).

Though you can control most aspects of your cluster though a combination of Hyper-v

manager and failover cluster manager from a remote management station, I will only be

covering administration of the Hyper-v cluster through SCVMM.

Create an SCVMM server

If you do not already have an SCVMM server configured and online, you will want to install and

configure System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 onto a standalone server now. You

should follow the Microsoft hardware recommendations as a best practice for the server

deployment, especially, however I simply have created a VM for SCVMM and it works perfectly

fine for my needs since I have only a few Hyper-v servers onsite. One of the caveats here

though, is not to put the SCVMM VM on any node in the Hyper-v cluster to avoid potential

migration issues.

I will not cover the actual SCVMM install as it is pretty straight forward. I recommend

installing the SCVMM client management software onto your management workstation, after

you complete the SCVMM server installation, for convenience. One caveat with the SCVMM

server install is that it will suggest the use of 443 for BITs by default. You should change this

to another port number when prompted as 443 will often conflict during live migrations and

P2Vs etc. on servers running web services. The port number you choose in lieu is not too

critical since any work processed is done in the background and you will not need to actually

specify the port when administering from SCVMM.

Add the cluster to SVMM

Our first step will be to add our newly created Hyper-v cluster nodes to the SCVMM

management console.

1. Launch SCVMM from your management station

2. Select’ Hosts’ from the lower left hand navigation pane

3. Select Add Host from the upper right ‘Actions’ pane

a. Select Windows Server-based host on Active Directory domain

b. Enter in credentials for a user that has administrative rights on all of the nodes

c. Check the Host is in a trusted domain box and click next

d. On the ‘select Host servers’ page, enter the domain and add each of the Nodes

you created

Click next and then yes on the Hyper-v role prompt pop-up

e. On the configuration setting page, check the ‘Reassociate host…’ checkbox and

click next

f. On the Host properties page, add the two paths to your CSV folders

For example, if you used Volume1 and Volume2 as the names for your

CSVs you would use;

1. C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1

2. C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2

g. On the summary page, click Add Hosts.

Configure virtual networking on all the nodes

In order for high availability to function properly with Hyper-v, all given virtual network card

names must match, including case.

1. From SCVMM, select Hosts from the left navigation pane, and drill down to the nodes.

2. Right click on your first node, and select ‘properties’

3. Select the Networking tab from the Host Properties screen.

4. All the Virtual Network adapter names listed here must match on all the member

nodes in your hyper-v cluster.

5. Create the Virtual Network adapters that you wish to make available for your VMs to

use. In this example lets create one called LAN, and another called DMZ

a. From the Host properties of the node being configured, select the networking

tab and click Add.

b. Enter the name to give this adapter

i. note the chosen name as you will enter it on all other nodes after

c. Select the network binding – a Physical network adapter in this case

d. Choose whether or not to enable host access to this NIC

i. This is a very important option. If you uncheck this box;

1. The physical host server will no longer see this NIC in the O/S

2. No network communication via the selected NIC can reach the

host server as a result

ii. Uncheck this checkbox if you have a different NIC connected to the LAN

in the server that can used for management tasks;

This is ideal if you elect to risk using a server to serve both internal and

DMZ vritual machines as you can eliminate host access from the DMZ.

This option is useful for dedicating a NIC to the VMs , as administration

and management will not utliize the VM NIC and will be forced to use an

alternate NIC for such activities.

e. Click /Add…’ under the connection list box

f. From the Switch binding window, use the pull-down to select the appropriate

NIC to use for the Virtual Adapter, and click OK

g. Repeat step 5 for all other Virtual adapters you wish to have available to your

VMs.

6. Repeat the above steps on every Hyper-v node in your cluster.

Again, ensure that all nodes have all the exact same virtual network adapter

names used.

Add VMs to your Hyper-v cluster

Using SCVMM, there are a few different ways to get VMs running on your Hyper-v cluster,

depending on your scenario. The most common are;

1. Moving a VM to the cluster from a different Hyper-v server that is not

part of the cluster

2. Moving a VM from one of the nodes local drives onto the CSV to become

highly available – a part of the cluster

3. Creating a new VM from SCVMM

1) Moving a VM from another Hyper-v server into the Hyper-v cluster using SCVMM

a. Open SCVMM

b. Add the Hyper-v host running the VM to be migrated to SCVMM using the Add

host wizard (see the ‘add the cluster to scvmm section for details if needed)

c. From the left hand navigation pane, select ‘Virtual Machines’

d. From the upper left navigation pane, select ‘All hosts’

e. You will now see all VMs associated with every host you have added to SCVMM,

listed in the upper centre pane.

f. Right click the VM to move over to your Hyper-v cluster (Sandbox2008r2Core in

this example)

g. Select ‘Migrate’

h. If the VM is running, you will get a warning about saving state during migration

– click yes to continue

On the Select Host page, you are presented with a list of servers that are

available for placement. Notice the Rating system column. You can customize

this rating based on different resource priority preferences.

i. Select the host of your choosing, preferrably the one with the best rating – and

click next

j. Once you click next, a prompt popup appears stating you much change the VM

to Highly available to migrate to the chosen host. Click yes to have the VM

become highly available

k. On the next page of the wizard, you select the path that the VM flies will be

moved to.

l. Choose one of the two paths and click next

i. You may recall from earlier that each path is actually one of the two

SAN Virtual disks mapped via CSV.

m. On the select networks page, select the appropriate virtual network card for

your VM and click next

n. On the summary page, review then click ‘Move’

o. The migration process will move over the VM files, update the version of

integration services, and start the VM on the cluster.

2) Migrate storage

a. If you recently added an existing host to a cluster, none of its existing VMs will

yet be ‘highly available’ until they are moved onto one of the CSVs. You will

want migrate those VMs storage to one of the CSV paths. The other time you

may use migrate storage, is when you have a highly available VM that you want

to move from one of your CSV volumes to the other, perhaps for performance

tuning reasons or storage constraints.

b. To migrate storage, right click the desired VM and select ‘Migrate Storage’

c. Select the pack to one of the volumes from the CSV and click next

d. On the summary page, review then click move.

e. There will be a period of unavailability for the VM during the storage migration

process but it is not significant due to the method used by SCVMM.