Hot off the presses, the following whitepaper was recently published: EMC Business Continuity for Microsoft Hyper-V Enabled by EMC Symmetrix VMAX and SRDF/CE – A Detailed Review http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8099-business-continuity-hyper-v-vmax-wp.pdf Enjoy!
With Windows 2008 R2, we now have the option to use PowerShell when you want to look at things in the cluster from a command line along with the cluster.exe command. If you want to add a disk to a cluster using PowerShell, there are several different options. In my previous article, I explained how to add a disk in Windows 2008. This still applies to 2008 R2, but if you’re more comfortable using PowerShell, here are a couple of ways to do this. I am a novice PowerShell user so my examples are just some of the ways of … Continue reading Adding disks into a cluster using PowerShell
Here’s a video demonstration about using Hyper-V Live Migration in a SRDF/CE cluster. You might notice that we are not using CSVs in this demo as SRDF/CE does not currently support CSVs. I’ll write more on that topic later on when I find the time. [View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hhzay4Dqs:480:360] Direct link to the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Hhzay4Dqs
One of these days, I do plan on writing about other non-EMC geographically dispersed solutions…I swear [;)]. I just need to find the time to give these other products a proper test run before writing my opinions about them so I can give them a fair assessment. Though finding the time to “play” is becoming increasingly difficult lately. Anyway, reading Storagezilla’s blog reminded me that I left a little cliff hanger in one of my previous posts. There was a new addition to the EMC Cluster Enabler family, RecoverPoint Cluster Enabler (RP/CE) was introduced with the release of RecoverPoint 3.1 … Continue reading RecoverPoint Cluster Enabler
This isn’t specific to multi-site clustering, but I’ve certainly had to use this many times when adding devices to my multi-site clusters. Adding disks to a multi-site Windows 2008 cluster is not as easy as it should be. In Windows 2008, Microsoft has added some new “logic” while adding disk resources to a cluster. In Windows 2008, when you attempt to “Add a disk” through the cluster administrator GUI, the cluster does a quick check on the available disks to ensure that the disks are present on all nodes of the cluster before presenting this as an available disk in … Continue reading Adding a disk to a Windows 2008 Failover Cluster using cluster.exe commands
This week, Microsoft is announcing that Windows 2008 R2 will add a new feature to Failover Clusters called “Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)”. This feature is being introduced so that they can support the Live Migration feature for Hyper-V. You can get more details about CSV and other 2008 R2 features in the following document: Windows Server 2008 R2 (Beta) Reviewers Guide – http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/1/F2146213-4AC0-4C50-B69A-12428FF0B077/Windows_Server_2008_R2_Reviewers_Guide_(BETA).doc They are giving sessions about this at WINHEC and TechEd EMEA this week. Unfortunately, I won’t be attending these, but it’ll be really interesting to see where this goes in the future. This certainly gives you an … Continue reading New Feature in 2008 R2 – Cluster Shared Volumes
It’s been a really busy month for us. This past month, EMC has released a new version of SRDF/CE, MV/CE and internally announced a new addition to the Cluster Enabler family. I don’t think it’s been publicly announced, so I’ll have to refrain from posting any details on the third item at this time. SRDF/CE and MV/CE version 3.1 are now available for download on EMC’s Powerlink website. Here are the new features in these releases: SRDF/CE v3.1 Hyper-V “host clustering” support. Not really a new feature…this is more of a qualification effort to ensure that this works. … Continue reading EMC Cluster Enabler Updates
I learned today that SQL 2008 will actually not install by default in many multi-site cluster solutions. Why? Well, during the SQL 2008 installation, it runs through a Configuration Checker where one of the tests the environment to ensure that the cluster is configured properly. In a geographically dispersed cluster (specifically in an SRDF/CE cluster) this check will fail with the error: The cluster on this computer does not have a shared disk available. To continue, at least one shared disk must be available. Doing a little bit of research on this might lead you to the MSKB … Continue reading SQL Strikes Again
I’ve been playing around with Microsoft Windows 2008 clusters for a while now trying to test out some of the new features and how they will affect multi-site clusters. One of the best new features (in my opinion) in 2008 clusters is the ability to have cluster nodes on different subnets. Microsoft does this by introducing a new OR dependency option for resources. In 2008 clusters, you have two options when making a resource depend on more than one resource: AND. This indicates that both the resource in this line and one or more previously listed resources must be online … Continue reading Multiple Subnets with Windows 2008 Clusters
I was informed that feedback for Microsoft product groups should be done through the http://connect.microsoft.com page. So I’ve submitted a request to add support for clusters running multiple subnets here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=353894 Please feel free to join in and rate/add your comments to my submission. Let the SQL team know that this is something that they need to address.
