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Hi, Not sure where to put this, but here goes. I'm looking at replacing our aging servers, and wanted to Migrate them to Hyper-V. I was looking at using a Dell SCv2020 with SAS connections back to a few Servers to run a Hyper-V Failover Cluster. My question is, and I apologise if its a stupid question, but everything I read just says the storage (and the connections to is) need to be iSCSI-3 capable, and that fibre channel is. However I wanted to use the 4x 12Gb SAS connections direct to the servers. Would I be able to setup a Hyper-V Failover Cluster with CSV using a SAS attached SAN? eg 4x servers with dual SAS HBA's, each connection to one of the 4 SAS ports on the SAN, (the SCv2020 SAN has dual controllers, so each server would connect to each controller) as per link or would I have to use iSCSI over Ethernet, or Fibre Channel or would you highly recommend against using SAS over any of the other two? Cheers in advance

I just inherited a fairly medium-sized network (>500 workstations) on one broadcast domain. I plan to split this up into smaller subnets for better control and performance. The Windows 2008 R2 AD with 2 domain controllers is the least of my problem but what is bothering me is the lack of redundancy for the DHCP service which is really a major component. Other than putting the DHCP service in a 2008 cluster, what other methods are available to create a reliable DHCP service for a routed network?

Dear all, I'm looking at virtualising our server rack, and seeing as we have an SAS SAN, using a failover cluster as well, all using current hardware. We are a split site school, fibre-optic joining the two sites, with one network / AD, approx. 3400 students and 450 staff. Current hardware: 3 x IBM x3650 (2 NICs, 1 x E5430, 4GB) 2 x IBM x3550 M2 (2 NICs, 1 x E5540, 10GB) 1 x IBM x3550 M3 (2 NICs, 1 x E5620, 16GB) 1 x IBM x3550 M3 (2 NICs, 2 x E5620, 16GB) 1 x IBM DS3512 5TB SAN with dual controllers (4 SAS ports & 2 NICs per controller) Currently the SAN is connected to one of the x3550 M3 via both controllers for redundancy. At a high level I'm thinking the following: 2 x3650 as backup DCs (1 on each site) 1 x3650 with a 12TB NAS for backups (on the other site to the main server room) 4 node fail-over Hyper-V 2012 cluster on the 2 x3550 M2 and 2 x3550 M3 The cluster will contain the main DC (inc. DNS & DHCP), MS-SQL / application server, Print server, file server, SIMS server, SharePoint server. Anyway, I think the upgrades I need are as follows: 6 extra SAS controller cards and cables for the 3 x3550 not currently connected to the SAN 4 additional twin NIC modules for the 4 x3550 (to bring each one up to 4 NICs each) More RAM to bring all x3550 to a minimum of 16GB My questions are: How does the SAN connect to all 4 nodes? I think run 1 SAS cable from each node to each SAN controller (so 2 per node for redundancy) How does the SAN connect on the network? 1 NIC per controller is currently plugged in, but I haven't traced where they go yet How do the nodes wire up together for the cluster network / failover? I think each node will connect to each other node (3 NICs per node) or use a dedicated switch (1 NIC per node, or 2 teamed) How do the nodes connect to the main network? Here I'm thinking that the 4th NIC on each node connects to the main backbone / network switch (or 2 teamed if using a node switch for Q3) How am I doing? Can anyone offer any advice on the above? Although my investigation is into a 4 node cluster, I actually suspect a 2 node cluster would suffice, on the two x3550 M3, but if I can get the budget I may as well make it a 4 node. The IT budget here is a very strange affair, so it wouldn't be as though I could use the unspent money on another project. If the 'budget' isn't approved, then I will look to the 2 node cluster and possibly stretch to an additional E5620 CPU. Many thanks for any comments!

I all hoping some one can help on this one. We recently purchased 2x Dell NX3000 Enterprise so it can be clustered. Has anyone got experience in Storage Server 2008 R2 when it comes to clustering? I have done a lot of googling for about 3 days and yet to find any good instructions on how to setup what we have. They are both setup as Raid5 with two partitions one for System and the other which will be for the data. What we are after is setting these servers up as a cluster using the partition D:\ (which is about 1TB) for the shared data - File Server to replace our current Home Drives. Two problems I am having: First is no disks detected even though the first check actually picks up all the disks but the others appear with warnings, no cluster hard disks detected. Second the network setttings are requesting certain things to be setup, single point of failure warnings. Which according to my research it needs a VLAN between the two servers for a dedicated link and two seperate network ports setup for network activity. I am hoping some one can help, perhaps a Cluster Guru about ? all the googling including the technet has not helped me what so ever. In fact everything I have tried - including creating a VHD/iSCSI target still does not show up in a Cluster HD setup screen.

I have been stuck with this since last Friday and it's really starting to depress me, as I finally thought I was ready to push ahead with deploying proper new servers when I noticed this behaviour, and it's a problem that involves a great deal of waiting to see if it's fixed so I am bored of watching it now. I'm just testing a new Hyper-V cluster before pushing ahead with production, and when I live migrate my test VM, pings into the server drop for anywhere between 20-100 pings, unless I ping out from the server. So far, so similar to many other issues, and clearly ARP-related - the switch visibly has the incorrect ARP entry until I ping out from the guest. I've run Wireshark captures on both Hyper-V hosts in the cluster on the NIC with the virtual network, and captured the debug output from my HP A5800 switch for ARP packets as well, and as best I can tell, the issue is because Hyper-V never sends a gratuitous ARP out to update the routing tables. Is there anything likely to be stopping these gratuitous ARP packets being sent out by the server? I can see other gratuitious packets being sent round the network on the Wireshark logs. This is all Server 2008R2, hosts and guests, as up to date as can be (apart from this week's patches, not got round to them yet), running a cluster on an FC SAN hosting the CSV, on HP DL380 G7s with a mix of onboard Intel NICs and expansion-card Broadcom NICs. The NICs are teamed but disabling that/changing settings/running on only a single NIC does nothing to resolve the situation. I'm performing the Live Migrations from a third physical server running SCVMM. Has anyone got any clues? I've tried destroying and recreating the cluster and it's made no difference; I don't yet want to rebuild the virtual hosts from scratch because that's a fairly time consuming option. Help, my sanity is at stake

Hi there, I just wanted to get other peoples thoughts on the best way to implement a file server solution that allows HA. Currently we have a Dell Equallogic SAN which we will be using for storage and what I was thinking was to use Server 2012 as a means of presenting that storage to the users on the network. The 2 ways I see that I could possibly do this is to either make 2 X virtual 2012 servers in a cluster which will then connect via iSCSI to the SAN. Then use Classic File share with continuous availability. However all of my client pc's that will be connecting to this share are Windows 7 for the foreseeable future and from what I read if a client was performing a large file transfer when one of the nodes goes down then they get an error about the location no longer existing. While this is not likely to happen every day (the large transfers I mean) it does occasionally happen between certain departments. Or my other thought on this to have those server 2012's running with Network load balance IP between them with an appropriate record pointing to said IP that would be the new file server name that we use. But I am not sure if this may cause conflicts with both servers being connected to the SAN and if say one user was load balanced to one server and accessed the same data that another user would be using while connected through the other server. Any advice that you could offer regarding this would be appreciated.

Hi All We have recently moved our 2 SIMS Databases over to a 2008R2 SQL Cluster and they are working fine. However... We can't get Discover to work, it keeps coming up with 'There has been an issue loading the catalog. This has been logged. Would you like to try and load the catalog again?' I logged a case with Capita, however they closed the case as they don't support SQL Clusters!! Anyone else know how to fix the problem and also had issues with Capita not support cluster environments? Thanks! Tom

Hi We have a migrated DHCP from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2008 and I went to change our DNS server entries (change the second DNS to a new DC ip) but after making the change XP clients are only getting the FSMO DNS (which should be DNS 1) and not the changed second DNS entry. I tried reordering the list so the new DNS ip was first but clients still receive only the FSMO ip as a DNS server. The strange thing is a standalone vista client gets both IP's and seems to work correctly. I added a gateway ip to the DHCP and XP clients got that change but they just wont update DNS ip's Am I doing something silly or should this not just work? Any ideas? Cheers

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete I just read this article on how the shear volume of data now available to organizations like Google will drive a new wave of science. Instead of running countless experiments and attempting to formulate a model that explains them this new method simply analyzes the vast amount of data available and looks for correlation. This effectively turns the whole world into the lab and society itself is running some of the experiments by people simply existing in their day to day lives. I don't think it will replace the traditional science lab anytime soon but eventually every science class may need access to a supercomputing cluster just to keep up.

We have set up a cluster file server on 2 blades running Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. I can access the file shares on the cluster using the cluster name, eg \\clustername\share, but I am unable to access them via the cluster's IP address, eg \\x.x.x.x\share. Does anyone know how to resolve this?? Any help would be much appreciated.

Hi All, I'd like to build highly redundant SQL Server 2008 database and Infrastructure monitoring software for both my production and DR environment, I wonder if this design below is make sense and can provide me with sufficient redundancy at any level ? http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/4241/redundancydiagram.jpg My goal is that when the Production site is having a problem, the user can use the monitoring application from DR site as automated fall back plan. Any kind help and suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Hi We have a 2008 failover cluster with several high availiblty images running on it. I want to remove one of the images from HA and make it just run on one server rather then the cluster (the server is part of the cluster but will host both cluster images and the standalone) Has anyone done this? I assume I just delete the node in failover manager but I dont want to click the button until I know its not going to wipe the image. Cheers