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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Hyper-V Host Clustering via ISCSI

There's a lot of articles out there about Hyper-V host clustering. But there isn't much about the associated caveats. The main issue I ran into was with creating new physical disk resources. When you create a cluster and add nodes to it, you may end up adding a disk resource from a machine that does not own the cluster group. Yes, contrary to what it looks like in the GUI, there are still cluster groups, and much of the underlying clustering administration is unchanged from server 2003. If you're in a situation where you need to add physical disk resources and the GUI won't see them, here's what you do:

1. On one of the nodes that is a possible owner for the resource, open two consoles as an administrator.

2. Log on to the LUN via the ISCSI administrator

3. In storage management, bring the disk online, initialize the disk, and create a simple volume (note, you can initialize the disk via MBR or GPT, but the disk MUST be a basic disk).

4. In the first command prompt you have open, type diskpart. Type select disk <appropriate disk number here>. And then type detail disk. You should see something like this:
MSFT Virtual HD SCSI Disk Device
Disk ID: 2E3EA1FE
Type   : iSCSI
Bus    : 0
Target : 10
LUN ID : 0
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No

5. In the second command prompt, type Cluster res "<resource name here>" /create /group:"Available Storage" /type:"Physical Disk"  This will create the resource.

6. In the second command prompt, type Cluster res "<resource name here>" /priv DiskSignature="0x<DiskID from first command prompt>" The 0x before the disk ID listed is important, and you won't be able to bring the disk online if you leave it out.

7. In the second command prompt, type Cluster res "<resource name here>" /on This will bring your new disk resource online.

When doing this, make sure that the Available Storage resource group is owned by a machine with access to the LUN you're trying to bring online. It seems that Microsoft wants you to grant access to every node in your cluster, but if you're like me and are a bit nitpicky about which machines have access to which LUNs, you'll want to follow these steps.

posted @ Tuesday, December 09, 2008 5:06 PM | Feedback (1420) | Filed Under [ Operating Systems Servers ]

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