If you work with Exchange 2007 or Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services in any anger, you’ve probably had to use Network Load Balancing (NLB) to balance services. For example I use it for the Client Access and Hub Transport roles in Exchange 2007, and to balance requests across my Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) Gateway servers. However, when virtualising these services, I found that Hyper-V doesn’t always play nice with NLB.
A quick disclaimer: this should work for the entire IBM DS3xxx series, but I’ve only tested with the DS3300. Your Mileage May Vary!
So I’ve decided to have a go with some pre-release software and use Hyper-V R2 server. I work with several clients who rely on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise using Hyper-V in a clustered manner and either Enterprise R2 or Hyper-V R2 sound perfect for them. Cluster Shared Volumes are a brilliant idea and bring Hyper-V much closer to VMware for management ease. Specifically on my SAN I’m using IBM’s DS3300 iSCSI platform so to try this out I went about trying to get the RDAC MPIO drivers installed on the Hyper-V R2 beta.
One of the projects I have been working on recently is to try and improve overall application availability, without spending a large sum of money. I’m constrained on the operating systems I can use (mainly restricted to Windows Server Standard Edition but some Linux too) and my budget is non-existent. So, after a bit of reading of what is and isn’t possible, I decided to investigate Microsoft’s Virtual Server in a host clustered environment.
In my last post I wrote about building an iSCSI-based SAN using cheap hardware and software. Now for the application layer – virtualisation! But how do we do this using cheap – or free – software?
Installing VMware on a Linux server is a cheap and easy way to get virtual machines up and running. In order to maximise system resources for VMware, an absolutely minimal Linux base operating environment provides the ideal platform to build upon.