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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!

Hi, I am thinking of creating a hyper-v cluster or hyper-v replication between 2 Proliant G6 servers. I will obviously need good bandwidth between our 2 main hyper-v hosts. They are in the same rack and both have spare NIC ports so can I just connect a network cable directly between the servers to get a 10GB link? I will still have connections via the switches. Can I do this without causing a network loop? Will turning on spanning tree protocol on the switches solve this? Can/should I give the spare NIC's an IP address in a different range as they are only connecting to each other via those NIC's?

Still trying to wrap my head around all this Hyper-V stuff. I've got two hosts, both dual-socketed with hexacore Xeons, so 12 cores/ 24 threads each, and 32GB of RAM. They'll operate in a failover cluster with live migration in case anything goes wrong. I've got it planned so that the startup RAM for every VM totals 30Gb (leaving two for the host) so that in the case of a failover, one host can manage every VM. I'm then planning on using the dynamic memory to let VMs grow to a higher value when both hosts are up and there's 60Gb of RAM available to use overall. However, I cannot, for the life of me, find out if I can do a similar thing with CPU cores. Does this mean I need to plan my core allocation to fit into the 22 available threads and waste half my processing power for a just-in-case scenario? Or will Hyper-V/VMM allow for CPU oversubscription, where in normal day-to-day activity there's no oversubscription taking place except when one host failsover? Potentially it's not as wasteful as it might seem as it would at least mean that VMs have real cores allocated rather than HyperThreaded Pretend Cores, except when failing over, but it still strikes me as under-utilising resources. Has anyone set this up to know better than Google?

Hi guys, I am setting up a new network over the summer in our school. We have two buildings, about a half mile apart. They are connected by a 100mbs radio link on the roof. It is pretty stable but occasionally someone puts a tower crane or something in the way and we lose it for a few days. I want to have a server in each building that runs the AD and has the user shares on them. I want people in building A to use server as their gateway/dns/ad server etc and when they go to building B, use server B etc. Of course I need all the info in the AD and on the shares to be in sync. Is it possible to set something up that will sync the AD, GPO etc data every night and also sync any changes in shared data? This way if we lose the link people can still operate relatively normally. Failover clustering doesnt seem to be what I need. Obviously we can't have a physical cable link between them or we wouldn't need this solution. Summary: Two servers, one LAN, physically separated with 100mbs radio link Need both servers to be AD servers and store the shares Need both server to be reasonably in sync (1/2 days old) for shares and up to date for AD, GPO info etc. Currently running one server for the whole place, what's the best way to set up the second? Thanks in advance, Niall.

Hi I was wondering what mehods people use to make SIMs redundant/failover I am currently running 1 sims server which is backed up every night to a DLT drive and the tape from the previous nights backup is taken off site. I contacted capita today and was told that they are developing a redundant/failover system but it will be "some time" until its avaliable. The best option I can think of that will not compromise my support contract is to purchase another server with a DLT drive and configure it with SQL2005 standard and SIMs and should a failure occur with the live server use the most recent backup tape to restore the SIMs.mdf and .ldf etc to the new server. My problem with this arrangement is that It will take 4 hours + to restore. assuming it fails during the working day. I would dearly like to have some kind of failover so that if the server fails the user will notice no loss of service giving me time to repair/replace the dead server while running from the hot spare. Is anyone running such a system while still recieving support from Capita ? The motivation for this is that we are nearing a time where parents will be able to view attendance data and acheivement data from SIMs via our VLE and as the VLE reads the data from SIMs I would like it to be as robust as possible... Maybe I am asking too much !

Hello there! I work in a primary school and we currently have a number of server 2012's (4), what I would like to achieve is total failover with the utilisation of a SAN. I've been looking into HP P2000 SAN and think it looks great. I want to be able to setup two of the servers as DC's (as they are at the moment) but have all files and services shared between them. I would like to add virtual servers to them eventually and be able to use server aware updating. Initial storage will be comprised of 600gb 10k SFF SAS drives giving me a total of 4tb storage. (I have no idea how to divide this up as of yet) We have HP DL380's as the servers, each with 4 NIC's in the rear. (all configured as one NIC on each server, and trunked on the switches) We have HP Procurve layer 2 switches which are fully Gb, with two vlans (main school network and separate guest WIFI VLAN) I believe the simplest way is with an expansion card in each server and then using DAS to connect to the SAN, (two mini SAS cables on each server for redundancy) I also believe that this has the fastest throughput, however I am trying to think long term, and if I use iSCSI I understand I can then add new servers to the cluster, and take the old ones offline once all of the roles have been transferred? can anyone offer any advice on this please? We currently have: SERVER 1: AD DNS DHCP FILE SERVER (DFS, DFSR) SERVER 2: AD FILE SERVER (DFS, DFSR) SERVER 3: PRINT SERVER WDS\SCCM EPO WSUS SERVER 4: DAS STORAGE SPACE for local server backups. I would like to be able to provide all of my staff with DIRECTACCESS too at the end of the project. our school is a large primary school serving approximately 100 members of staff, 480 pupils, and approximately 150 PC's/LAPTOPS with the possibility of adding in more mobile devices this year (about 30 more) we have a ruckus managed wireless network so network throughput isn't a massive issue at all, I just need help with the backend. Thanks!!! Karl p.s. Please forgive the poor grammar and spelling!

We have just purchased a Thecus 1U4600R and need to know which link aggregation type to use. These are the options available Load Balance/Fail-over/Balance-XOR/802.3ad/Balance-TLB/Balance-ALB. It is currently plugged into a Netgear GS724TP which has been configured with a Link Aggregated Group of two ports. Will one of the options provide load balance and failover?

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.

We have a major issue with our failover cluster. One of the cluster shared volumes has stopped working. The shared volumes are all iSCSI from an HP MSA2312i, the volume in question was Volume 3 and connected to LUN4 While attempting to connect a new volume, it was noticed that there was an error with volume 3 - it was showing error 5120 (degraded) The volume was accessible and all the servers running from it were OK. I attempted to move the volume to another host to resolve the issue but this didn't help. So I took it offline and attempted to then bring it back online. This is where the problem started!!! The disk came back online but didn't have anything associated to it, say it needed an NTFS volume. Checking in disk management a dialogue box appeared (can't remember what is said, but I clicked OK) Now in disk management the drive is showing as unallocated space. I've checked on the SAN and there are no errors. If I right click on the drive in disk management I can only create a simple volume on the drive. Has the drive contents gone? Is there anyway I can recover it? Am I in for a mammoth restore session tomorrow? Any help is extremely welcome.