Creating a windows 2008 cluster in vmware

From the Actions pane, hit the Add button. Once you click OK , you should have an anti-affinity rule created in the vCenter console similar to the one bellow. Type ForceAffinePoweron in the Options column and give it a value of 1.

Now when we go and build the Windows Failover Cluster , the storage checks should pass with no problems during the validation wizard, which is exactly what we wanted. If you get any errors or warnings, please post them in the comments area so the community can know about them.

If we want to migrate the VMs to a different ESXi host, no problem, we can do that, and vMotion is doing the job just fine. The validation succeeds,. But remember, we have an anti-affinity rule, so the VM will not be started on an ESXi server where other Windows machines that participate in the Windows Failover Cluster are running.

This last type of cluster configuration is pretty much the same as Cluster Across Boxes CAB , just that now we have at least one Windows physical host involved. I will not go too deep into the subject here since most of the settings and configurations were covered in the previous section, the CAB section , so if you need extra information, please read that section. The most important thing in making this work is to map the same LUNs to the physical and virtual machines.

During the Windows Failover Cluster validation configuration wizard, everything should be good and green. In the end, I will leave it up to you to choose which type of Windows clusters you want to build on your VMware infrastructure, but take advantage of this for your sensitive applications and services so you have at little as possible of downtime.

Of course this is just anon internet guy advice, you always choose yourself what to fu…fun with in production. Thanks a lot for creating this blog with a lot of good information. Would you mind to make two changes to the content: 1. Add a mention that starting with vSphere 7. This is an interesting article. Would it be possible to adapt this type of clustering for printing? Hi, Sure, it works. The cluster service does not know if it is a virtual environment or not.

Would any of the steps change if my nodes are Server ? You began with and OS. Also, a previous comment mentioned writing about adding the disks within Windows. Did you do that? Would be helpful as you said. Thank you again! Hi, It will work great for Server , as for the other article I did not get a chance yet, but it on my table. Given that WSFC anyway cares to make the shared disk usable on one node only? You can give it a try with some pilot users and see how it works, but on some heavy clusters I will not try this.

Hi, Thanks for the idea. I will start creating an article about this, just make sure you are subscribed to my newsletter to be notified when is published.

Are you able to provide the information you found from VMware regarding the compliance of this in a production environment? At least the official vmware documentation does not say that it has to be established. Hi John, I followed the VMware docs just to be sure and it is supported. I also tested it and it works great. Let me know if you have any other doubts and I will try to explain them.

The disk size depends on the services that will run in the cluster. Anyway at the end you should have all your disks listed in the StarWind console. Check the Failover Clustering box and hit Next then Install. Repeat this operation on the second node. On the Quick Connect window select each discovered targets and click the Connect button. Put those disks online, initiate them, format them using NTFS and assign a drive letter. At the end they should look like this:.

In the Enter server name box type the name of your servers that participate in the cluster and click the Add button. Leave the default option to validate the cluster and click Next. In the Validate a Cluster Wizard go with the defaults. At the end you should see only green checks. If you have errors or warnings fix them before continuing.

Back to the Create Cluster Wizard we need to type a name for this cluster give it a name that defines your service running on the cluster and assign it an IP address.

When the wizard starts creating the cluster it also tries to create a computer account named after your cluster. If the account you are logged in with on the server does not have admin rights in Active Directory, you need to contact the AD team to create the computer account before you create the cluster. If you take a look in AD, you should see the cluster computer account created by the Create Cluster Wizard.

Again, this happened because I was logged in with a domain admin account when I ran the wizard. We created the cluster, but some things need to be done after. Verify that the wizard assigned the correct drive to the quorum and only the LAN network adapter listens to clients.

To verify the quorum drive click the Storage object in the console. Looks like the wizard was smart enough to know which drive to assign for the cluster quorum. If you right-click the networks and choose Properties , only the LAN network should have the option Allow clients to connect trough this network enabled.

To verify that it works, shut down Node1 since this is the active node right now and see if the quorum and data disks fail to the second node. The first was that I know you mention the trial for Starwinds, the free version should do what is needed except that I am setting this system up using ESXi to host my Windows Servers and the free version of Starwinds will not install on Windows Server running on a hypervisor. So the trial or paid for versions of Starwinds are the only way to go.

The Create Cluster Wizard begins, click Next. I will type in sql1 and click Add followed by typeing in sql2 and clicking Add. Type in a name for your cluster. Enter in an IP address for the Windows Cluster. All the information is gather and you are ready to create your Windows Cluster.

The Windows Cluster has been created successfully. You can see both sql1 and sql2 nodes in the cluster, along with the Networks. Click on Cluster Network 1, this is my Lan network.

Right click on Cluster Network 1 and select properties. Change the name to Lan and make sure Allow cluster network communication on this network and Allow clients to connect through this network are ticked. Click Ok. Select Cluster Network 2.

This is my Heartbeat or cluster communications network. Right click on Cluster Network 2 and select properties.