Cluster issues with Server 2012R2

[McChikenhanger]

Hi everyone. Since I work in education I have built a Test Cluster Environment on a shoe string, comprising of 2 identical HP ML servers acting as Hyper-V Hosts, and another HP DL server with loads of hard drives to act as the central iSCSI target repository.

 

At the moment the Cluster is all working fine, I can do live migrations between the 2 hosts. However, the second that I turn one of the Physical Hosts off, and after all of the VMs are migrated, the remainder Physical Host then cannot see the iSCSI targets and the whole cluster fails in a spectacular fashion.

 

Just wondering if anyone has experienced a similar problem and if they know where I am going wrong please? All servers are part of the same test domain, and are connected through a normal Cat5 switch. So no fancy Fibers are in used or anything like that.

 

Many thanks,

 

An IT Technician With a Bleeding Forehead.

[ColinP]

Im not 100% but you will probably need to setup Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)

[DavetheITguy]

You will need to create two volumes on your SAN one for the cluster storage and one for Quorum which contains the information about the cluster I have that set to 3GB on the SAN it never gets full and the rest of the storage is for my VMs. Use ISCSI Initiator to load the specified drives and then us e the Failover Cluster Manager wizard to setup the Storage etc. Make sure your IPs on the SAN and server can connect to each other this is imperative if you want them to fail-over. The wizard will walk you through everything. Any issues let me know.

Hope this helps.

David

[McChikenhanger]

Hi Guys, thank you for the replies. All sorted. The first time that I created the Quorum Witness through the Wizard I used the Folder Share option for it, and it looks like this is what was causing the issue. I created a new iSCSI Disk of 1Gb for the Quorum and recreated the Witness pointing to this and the Failover now works fine.

 

However the other thing I don't understand is if the Cluster is supposed to be doing load balancing too? As at the moment I'm having to move the VMs between Nodes manually.

 

Many thanks,

 

An IT Technician with a less bruised head, but still hurting.

[DavetheITguy]

You can set the hosts you'd rather have the VMs on. they will automatically shuffle between if one dies and then revert back when the host is online again.

[McChikenhanger]

Ah cool. Yes I saw that option earlier on, and I was wondering about that. I'll play around with it a bit more. Thanks so much DavetheITguy.

 

My headache has magically gone.