topic Re: microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix in Data Protection

microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix

daniel_kaiser — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:03:35 GMT

This post was originally posted in the Virtualization section, but since i haven't received any feedback, i thought i'll post it here.

Hi,

I wasn't sure where to park this question and since it has something to do with virtualization, I thought I'd put it here. We're currently looking to setup a new cluster based on Windows 2008 R2 and our NetApp SAN (FC) w/Snapdrive 6.3. This new cluster will be used for MS SQL 2008 R2 clustering. We're continuing to do some research but just wanted to get some of your input on either going virtual for the two host machines (VM Guests on ESX 4.0), two physical boxes, or one physical and the other a VM. Thanks in advance.

We're also looking to leverage SM for SQL too.

Re: microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix

evilensky — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 01:31:08 GMT

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_mscs.pdf

virtual cluster members are currently only supported using FCP-attached shared storage.

Our organization are using in-guest iscsi initiators (an unsupported configuration) without any trouble, but its a risk.

We prefer the virtual cluster-across-boxes approach simply because using a physical box makes no sense in our datacenter, since our vmware setups are by far our most reliable platform....

Re: microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix

daniel_kaiser — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:07:54 GMT

Thanks Evilensky,

Have you ran into any issues managing or troubleshooting the cluster due to the virtualization layer?

We're really leaning towards a physical box for the active node while a VM guest machine for passive and hope others in the community can chim in and provide some additional info regarding this type of setup in their environment. BTW, we're running FCP and NFS.

Dan

Re: microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix

evilensky — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:41:32 GMT

ESX for us has been stable as a rock, much more so than physical hardware alone. Not a single issue has been due to the virtualization layer.

I also found this in the http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf VMware best practice tech report. I will investigate what it means but maybe support status is better than I thought:

Re: microsoft clustering with physical, virtual, or mix

evilensky — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:19:17 GMT

More confusion...this time from the ESXi 4.1 Configuration Guide: