Operating system clustering is one of the major and popular high availability mechanism in system infrastructure products. Advantage of the os clustering is it can identify the application level failure.
As a systems administrators most of the time we may need to work with MS windows failover clusters. Most of the file servers and SQL clusters are depend on this failover cluster technology. Most of the situation one of the main requirement is this failover cluster is shared lus/disk. Earlier most of the time we sued to have minimum two physical servers for this cluster operation which is directly connect to SAN device(Shared storage). But to get the benefits of virtualization platform and reduce the cost , now we have to use same cluster features on top of the virtualization platform.
1. In my below example Im using two test virtual machines.
2. Now we need to add new scsi controller per this vm
Once we add the scsi controller , we need to do below changes to this new scsi controller
3. We need to make sure that we have done above changes to both vms.
4. Now its time to add first shard VMDK file to both vms.Therefore first we need to create vmdk from first virtual machine.This vmdk should provision as Thick Eager Zeroed and mount with our new scsi controller.Disk no also need to be same in both virtual machines.
4. We can copy this vmdk path
5. From my second virtual machine, click on add new device and we can select Existing Hard Disk option.
6. We can then point this to vmdk which we have created from our first vm.
7. Same way we can add multiple vmdk files to our vms.These disks are compatible with Microsoft Failover Cluster and now we can build our cluster from Windows OS
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