I've been using Esxi for about four years and have it running at four sites. All sites are simple, nothing complicated setups and pale in comparrison to what most of y'all deal with.
With that said, yes, I've RT*M and everything I can find out there on setting up a simple cluster with Esxi 5.1 and I'm confused. All I want it two Windows servers that will function in a cluster so that if one dies (or whever the technical term is....if I understand correctly, a Failover Cluster vs a Load-Balanced Cluster) the other will take its place. I will have the servers on two different physical boxes. Remember, we are trying to do this as inexpensively as possible - small business.
Questions:
Thanks for any help y'all can provide!
Arch
What Microsoft product are you trying to cluster? Your solution will depend on if it is file/print or Exchange or SQL. With VMware HA you typically just have a single virtual machine and it gets restarted on another host should the host it is running on fail. If you're running clustering at the MS level, then you don't necessarily need HA.
It will just be a file / printer server. As of right now its also a domain contoller but I can split that off if it throws a kink in the works.
Also, I just re-read your answer and am I reading right, HA can take the place of MS clustering?
With both HA and Windows file clusters you'll need some sort of shared storage. With HA you would have a single file server VM running on a single host. In the case of a host failure, the VM would be restarted on the other host so you would only have a few minutes of downtime. At the higher licensing levels you also get Fault Tolerance in which case the single VM actually runs simultaneously on two hosts, but again this requires shared storage.
With a MS file cluster you'll require shared storage so you could do it on a single host, but that would give you a single point of failure. You might be better off deloying two VM on different hosts each with their own storage. Configure DFS to replicate the files between the two servers. You could also double up the server roles on the VMs on run them as domain controllers. Running domain controllers on a MS file cluster is supported, but not recommended.
You have been a huge help!
So this shared storage is iSCSI, NAS, all of the above or something else? That is another phrase that is confusing. Several documents say it has to be fiber channel and then some documentation says it can be something else. I'm sitting here reading and now one source is talking about RDM's...what a can o' worms!
It depends. If you review the below KB article you'll see that FC is OK, guest iSCSI is OK, but not ESXi iSCSI to your SAN. It also covers RDM vs VMDK and a buch of other exceptions and requirements.
kb.vmware.com/kb/1037959
Here is the next SNAFU. Server 2008 R2 standard does not come with clustering..you have to jum to enterprise edition which is $$. Server 2012 standard comes clustering but doest not work with Vsphere 5.1 (the release notes say "Windows Server 2012 does not support failover clustering")??
Not to push a solution, but I think DFS would do the trick for you. No clustering setup or maintenance to worry about and you won't need any shared storage either.
I didnt think of DFS until you mentioned it but being able to solve this delimia was bugging me (and I wanted to learn something in the process!).
With that said, I have learned more about clusters, “shared storage”, “SCSI – 3 persistent reservations”, etc in the last two days than I wanted to (two nights till 2:00AM) but I figured it out!
Things I learned:
Its pretty dang cool. For the heck of it, I connected to the shared storage file share, and started reading files. I rebooted one of the clusters and kept reading the shared storage in the background….it never missed a beat.
Thus far, I have one part missing and that’s the cluster aware duplicate of the shared storage. I have not tackled it yet.
Arch
