iSCSI LUNs or Volumes and multiple access from different Hyper-V Host servers

[mbyrew]

I have a Dell Equallogic PS4000 iSCSI SAN which is devided up into multiple volumes or LUNS. One of these volumes is called 'VMs' for Virtual Machines which host the .vhd files that make up my Virtual machines on three Hyper-V Host Servers.

My experience so far shows me that whilst I can access a single same volume from the three Hyper-V hosts it likely ends in curruption of files so I have resorted to creating three volumes - one for each Hyper-V Host.

This appears to work fine (so far) however it brings complications with high availability and moving hosts etc.

Is it possible to configure the iSCSI SAN or Host servers so that all of the vhd files reside on the same volume with simultaneous access from all, as this will make fail-over and high availability easier to achieve. Currently I need to change the access rights on the SAN to stop one server and permit another when vm's are moved between hosts.

I am happy with the concept of MPIO from multiple NICs on each Host server but this does not help in the above situation.

[SYNACK]

To do this you need to run your Hyper-V hosts in a cluster so that you can use a clustered filesystem. This will let them all use the same LUN and allow for failover.
Setting up Live Migration cluster using Hyper-V
3. Hyper-V R2: Building a Hyper-V R2 Cluster | Media | TechNet Edge
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en
Building a Hyper-V Cluster on two W2K8 Nodes - ServerCare home
Hyper-V: Using Hyper-V and Failover Clustering

[mbyrew]

Thank you. An excellent article. Very useful.

Do you think I would be foolish to create virtual cluster servers with direct access to the SAN using iSCSI initiators from the VM's? This would leave me with 3 three Host servers instead of 1 if I use two of them for the cluster servers?

[strawberry]

the cluster servers are still available as host servers, the only difference is they can now share a lun for storing vhds. they also have the benefit of being able to to do live migration.

[mbyrew]

Thank you! Time to play again on Monday with this I hope.