Hi
I wish to deploy 2 Microsoft File servers (VMs) that share the same storage.
- The reason is to provide resilience and high availability.
- Resilience in that if one of the file servers fails, the other will be able to read/write to the storage.
- High availability so that we can take one of the servers out of production to apply windows updates and any other maintenance procedures.
HA/Resilience of the data storage itself will be handled by another DR solution.
We also want the solution to be relatively simple.
The simplest solution I can see is to deploy a failover cluster in Windows.
And to do this is to "Cluster Virtual Machines on One Physical Host".
The instructions for VMware are fairly clear, but I have questions which I can't find the answer to.
Any advice or answers people might have will be much appreciated.
1. When setting up the Failover Cluster in Windows, where is the "private" network used?
2. I believe the same vmdk is attached to both VMs.
- When setting up the Failover Cluster in Windows, does it recognise the drive on both VMs (vmdk) as the same disk in Failover Cluster Manager?
3. Can you read/write to the disk at the same time on both file servers? (I can see that the disk is set to multi-write).
- I'm not suggesting that we need to, I wondered if this was a limitation.
4. For the "Cluster-in-a-box" solution, vmotion is not supported/possible.
- What happens if the host that the VMs are on goes down, will the VMs be brought up on another host?
- I'm not sure if this comes under vmotion or not.
- I believe that they are brought up on another host as the guide states "Limit the number of hosts to two when you define host DRS group rules for a cluster of virtual machines on one physical host".
5. Is it not possible to snapshot the shared disk as it is "Independent-Persistent"?
I'm hoping that somebody has already setup this environment and will be able to guide me.
I will be setting up the environment in our testing environment but I don't want to re-invent the wheel twice!
Thanks
John