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jmmarton1
Contributor
Contributor

Clustering supported under ESXi?

I was talking to someone recently about clustering Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 under vSphere 5.  I know Novell has a Cool Solutions article about doing this under vSphere 4.  I've also seen official VMware docs discussing Windows clustering under vSphere.  However, the person I was speaking with swore up and down that official VMware does not support clustering any guest OS under any version of vSphere (or the older VI product).  Is this true?  If it is officially supported, does anyone have doc links which discusses this?  Preferably docs discussing OES2, but even anything discussing Windows?

Thanks.

Joe

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logiboy123
Expert
Expert

VMware does support many OS and application level clustering on top of the vSphere platform. Some notable systems that are supported are; Exchange, SQL and Oracle.

Regards,

Paul

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aravinds3107
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Some links related to Microsoft Cluster

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESX/ESXi

Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for Supported Configurations

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-mscs-gu...

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jmmarton1
Contributor
Contributor

Aravind Sivaraman wrote:

Some links related to Microsoft Cluster

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESX/ESXi

Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for Supported Configurations

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-mscs-gu...

Ah, thank you, from this clearly what I was told about clustering not being supported at all is not true.  So now the next question, is Novell Clustering Services officially supported?  All I could find is an old KB article (KB 944) discussing NCS with NetWare and GSX Server.  That's definitely not current, either with the OS or the hypervisor.  Is there official support for NCS with OES 2 (or OES 11) and ESX/ESXi?

Joe

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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

There is no official VMware-side statement that it is supported. That said, does this mean it's unsupported by default? I don't think so. I also haven't seen anything that says any guest clustering not explicitly supported (like Microsoft clustering) is generally unsupported.

Your best bet would be to open a support case with VMware and clarify what exactly you and your clustering solution are going to do. VMware probably will not provide any in-depth troubleshooting within the clustering solution, but as long as the issue is within the realm of normal VM-operations, I don't see any justifyable reason why they should turn you down (which doesn't mean they won't though). After all, for VMware/the hypervisor(s) it's just 2 VMs and some shared disks, with the actual magic being done by some application inside the VMs.

I assume at least limitations like the ones mentioned in the MSCS documents still apply:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1037959

Make especially sure Novell supports clustering across VMs on ESXi. RedHat for example openly supports clustering on vSphere:

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/High_Availability_Add...

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