Sharing HDD

[Bezwick]

I have been trying for a few days to work out to share 1 iSCSI target between multiple hosts. Its easily done to just create a VHDX from one host one the iscsi target but when i add a second host and map it to the same HDD it corrupts it. Now that does make sense as no host will be aware of the others. Having trawled google for a while I have found that when using hyper-v you can enable 'cluster shared volumes', however this only seams to share volumes from within a Hyper-v virtual machine. I need to share one large volume and store multiple Virtual Machines on it so i hot swap the machines between hosts.

Does anyone know how to do this with a Hyper-V system as is worked fine on VSphere which we used to have?

Thank you

[Achandler]

You are trying to set upa cluster of HyperV servers then. You cans till use a single target but have multiple server poiting to it.

 

You want to look at something like Failover Cluster Manager on yoru hosts and set that up, then you can move your VHDs onto the shared cluster storage and all can access it.

 

Is that what you mean?

[Bezwick]

Yes thanks. Currently i have 3 Server 2012 R2 host running multiple hyper-v VM's. My concern now is will those machines be affected if convert the hosts the are on to clusters?

[Achandler]

This was all done on 2008 R2 when I did it but from memory. Yes and No. I assume the VMs are being run from local storage? If so then once a physical machine is added then it can still run local VMs.

 

However, you would most likely get some form of downtime when you add a machine to a cluster, I think they need rebooting too. I also don't know if failover cluster manager wants to have a live migration network too anymore.

 

Honestly, you really want to have a plain server (or one with none essential VMs) to add the to the cluster first, even if it is an old server that might just be able to work one or two VMs, so you can move things across manually.