Yesterday I had an interesting problem I had to fix. As you may or may not know, using Hyper-V within Failover Clustering sometimes requires the use of volume GUIDs for storage if you have more LUNs than drive letters available (like we do). What you may not know is that these GUIDs can, under some circumstances, change – completely screwing up Failover Clustering’s ability to move virtual machines between nodes.
Over the last few weeks at work I’ve been working on host clustered Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 guests. Here’s how I go about setting up a new guest – it’s not particularly complicated but it is very long-winded. Caution: this article contains almost exactly the same information as Microsoft’s guide. I just re-wrote it to make it (a) more specific to my environment and (b) more readable for the people I work with.
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.