Clustering With Hyper-V - Dell PowerVault MD3200 Series White Paper

Planning for Hyper-V: PowerVault™ MD3200 and MD3200i Series of Arrays
Note: The pass-through physical disk must have a signature and be in an Offline state on the
parent so that you can assign the physical disk to a VM.

Clustering with Hyper-V

If you want to use clustering for Hyper-V, carefully observe the following requirements.
•
Use identical server hardware to eliminate issues regarding failover.
•
Avoid having a single point-of-failure in your communications network. Connect cluster-
nodes through a network that uses redundant switches or similar hardware.
Note: You can connect cluster-nodes with a single network. However, it is best to use a
redundant communications network.
•
All cluster disks must be basic disks. Dynamic disks are not supported.
PowerVault™ MD3200 storage array-specific cluster requirements:
•
Only use two dual-ported 6Gb SAS adapters for each server, and connect one port of
each adapter to the Dell PowerVault MD3200 storage array in clustered environments to
achieve the highest level of redundancy.
PowerVault™ MD3200i storage array-specific cluster requirements:
•
The storage configuration must be redundant. Use two or more network connections for
iSCSI traffic to the Dell PowerVault MD3200i storage array.
•
You must have dedicated iSCSI network adapters for iSCSI environments. You cannot
share communication and iSCSI traffic on the same adapter in clustered configurations.
All cluster-nodes must be able to communicate with the same virtual disks on the Dell PowerVault
MD3200 or MD3200i storage array. You can use storage partitioning to create a server group with the
cluster-nodes and assign the necessary virtual disks to them. Make sure that only the cluster-nodes
have access to those virtual disks and that other servers do not have access to those virtual disks.
When planning, create an additional virtual disk for the quorum disk. Make this virtual disk at least 1
GB in size. This disk contains the quorum information and is used as the witness disk. Format the
quorum virtual disk with NTFS.
If you plan to use pass-through devices on your VMs, you must make sure that the VM configuration files
are also stored on the shared storage and that the shared storage is available to all cluster nodes. You
can create an additional virtual disk on the Dell PowerVault MD3200 or MD3200i storage array or
increase the size of the quorum virtual disk to store the configuration files there. You also might create
an additional virtual disk with approximately 300 MB to 500 MB allocated for each VM. For example, 10
VMs equal a 5GB disk size.
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