Microsoft clustering

[Willie_Ekerslik]

I have read that MSCS is not supported by VMWare unless the VM boot partition is on local storage. I have two hosts which store all their VM's on shared storeage. I am going to be installing a two node cluster, one on each host. Can anyone confirm that I will have to store the VMDK's containing the VM's OS on local storage? I'm happy about the RDM's being stored on the SAN.

[TomHowarth]

What Vmware product and version number are you using???

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[A13x]

What your looking to do is supported on 3.5 update 2, however there are some incontinences between the patch notes and the documentation.

I have been told by vmware the patch notes are correct and doc is wrong so yes you can run it locally and RDM of SAN. The new update 2 allows you to run all of the SAN so you don’t need to store the nodes on local storage. i have a single noded MSCS running on the SAN and it seems to work fine, in 2 months time i will move 3 MSCS (2 nodes each) to the SAN and do likewise

[Willie_Ekerslik]

I'm running 3.5 patch 2

[TomHowarth · Accepted solution]

Thread moved to a more appropiate forum. prior to Update 1, MCSC servers had to have their node drives on local ESX storage, however that is no longer the case and full SAN based Clusters are now supported.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Message was edited by: tom howarth because of fat finger trouble and hitting a 2 instead of a 1

[kjb007]

MSCS has been fully supported as of MSCS U1. I have a file&print cluster, and was waiting until U1 to load it up. I use standard disks on my VMFS for the system drive, and RDM's for the data drives, and it runs very well. No issues to report. One thing to note, is that DRS is not recommended as the vmotion'ing could cause issues for the cluster.

-KjB