Clustering Hyper-V
During a visit to Microsoft today had a demo of clustering Hyper-V. Demo environment consisted of 2 Windows 2008 servers attached to an ISCSI target with 2 disks, one operating as the data disk where the virtual machine will reside, the 2nd disk acted as the quorum disk for the cluster.
One thing I was impressed with was how much the clustering in 2008 server has been simplified nice wizard based setup. Once the cluster was up and running the person giving the demo powered off the host which was running the virtual machine, after a short time the clustering kicked in a the disk containing the virtual machine was disconnected from the failed host, reconnected to the 2nd host and finally the VM was powered back up. The VM came back up in a dirty state as the power was pulled but assuming the OS or data was not corrupted offers protection against hardware failure of a Hyper-V host.
Microsoft announced that there weould be some enhancements made to Hyper-V in 2008 server R2, something to do with allowing both hosts to access the same disk akin to what is possible using VMware and their VMFS file system.
Microsoft then just need to add memory state migration and they’re heading to a VMware vmotion type solution.
Filed under: Microsoft Hyper-V