Hoping you guys could point me in the right direction for configuring a Hyper-V failover cluster that can handle live migrations. I think I have everything setup to the point that I just need to bring some shared storage online, but started getting a little overwhelmed with all of the different technologies available.
Background:
I started out with a single Server 2022 Datacenter host running Hyper-V. It's a dual CPU Epyc 7B13 (128 cores total) setup with 512gb of DDR4. For VM storage I setup a S2D simple four column storage pool on four 2TB NVME drives. I also setup another storage pool running a two column mirror on four 12TB spinning drives. So the VM's all run on 8TB of striped NVME storage and I've been making VM backups on 24TB of redundant HDD storage. Everything lived behind a virtualized Opnsense firewall and I've had about a dozen or so VM's chugging along for the last six months.
I've recently added a second node with the same hardware and software specs as the first one. The only real change so far is that I added Mellanox ConnectX-5 CDAT cards and have the hosts directly connected with DAC cables over a 200gb SET Team. The second node is hosting another Opnsense firewall and I've spent the last 2-3 weeks sorting out all of the HA network configuration. I've been able to successfully failover the network between virtual firewalls without dropping any connections on the VM's.
Where I'm at right now:
I migrated all of my VM's to a different NVME drive and removed the old VM storage pool. The cluster has been deployed and I setup an SMB file share witness running on a Raspberry Pi. I've created separate vnics on the 200gb SET Team for cluster, cluster storage, and Live Migration traffic. The only warnings I'm getting from the cluster validation wizard is that I haven't mapped vnics to physical adapters and that RDMA is enabled, but the vnics are reporting unknown for the RDMA Technology.
Here is where I may have screwed up. I ran "Enable-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect" and didn't notice it scooped up my redundant HDD storage pool on node 1 and is presenting it as Clustered Windows Storage. I had intended that to remain stand alone. Is it ok to leave it that way, or should I try removing it? Other than that, everything looks good. Both nodes show eight NVME drives (Four on each side) as primordial Clustered Windows Storage available disks. What I had originally envisioned was each node striping their four drives and mirroring changes for the shared storage. I thought this was something I could configure directly through S2D, but started reading about nested S2D resiliency, scale-out file servers, and several other options that left me a little overwhelmed. heh.. Could anyone give some advice on how to proceed? Not sure if I'm supposed to create the storage pools for each node in Server Manager and then use Cluster Manager to mirror those striped volumes as a cluster pool or if I should be looking at some of the other options.
Thanks!
Chad
Background:
I started out with a single Server 2022 Datacenter host running Hyper-V. It's a dual CPU Epyc 7B13 (128 cores total) setup with 512gb of DDR4. For VM storage I setup a S2D simple four column storage pool on four 2TB NVME drives. I also setup another storage pool running a two column mirror on four 12TB spinning drives. So the VM's all run on 8TB of striped NVME storage and I've been making VM backups on 24TB of redundant HDD storage. Everything lived behind a virtualized Opnsense firewall and I've had about a dozen or so VM's chugging along for the last six months.
I've recently added a second node with the same hardware and software specs as the first one. The only real change so far is that I added Mellanox ConnectX-5 CDAT cards and have the hosts directly connected with DAC cables over a 200gb SET Team. The second node is hosting another Opnsense firewall and I've spent the last 2-3 weeks sorting out all of the HA network configuration. I've been able to successfully failover the network between virtual firewalls without dropping any connections on the VM's.
Where I'm at right now:
I migrated all of my VM's to a different NVME drive and removed the old VM storage pool. The cluster has been deployed and I setup an SMB file share witness running on a Raspberry Pi. I've created separate vnics on the 200gb SET Team for cluster, cluster storage, and Live Migration traffic. The only warnings I'm getting from the cluster validation wizard is that I haven't mapped vnics to physical adapters and that RDMA is enabled, but the vnics are reporting unknown for the RDMA Technology.
Here is where I may have screwed up. I ran "Enable-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect" and didn't notice it scooped up my redundant HDD storage pool on node 1 and is presenting it as Clustered Windows Storage. I had intended that to remain stand alone. Is it ok to leave it that way, or should I try removing it? Other than that, everything looks good. Both nodes show eight NVME drives (Four on each side) as primordial Clustered Windows Storage available disks. What I had originally envisioned was each node striping their four drives and mirroring changes for the shared storage. I thought this was something I could configure directly through S2D, but started reading about nested S2D resiliency, scale-out file servers, and several other options that left me a little overwhelmed. heh.. Could anyone give some advice on how to proceed? Not sure if I'm supposed to create the storage pools for each node in Server Manager and then use Cluster Manager to mirror those striped volumes as a cluster pool or if I should be looking at some of the other options.
Thanks!
Chad