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.
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.
Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything here, mainly due to the stresses of work and also not really having anything interesting to say. Anyways, as part of a project here I’ve had to work with Linux over the last week or so – so here’s how I went about installing SuSE Enterprise Linux on Hyper-V.