Entries tagged with clustering - TechNet Edge

Creare un failover cluster per Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

PierGiorgio Malusardi — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:35:00 GMT

Durante gli eventi di lancio di Windows Server 2008 R2 e Windows 7 che si sono tenuti a Milano (22 ottobre 2009) e Roma (27 ottobre 2009) è stato usato un cluster di host di virtualizzazione basati su Windows Server 2008 R2 e Hyper-V.
Manule Maina ha usato questo cluster durante la keynote per mostrare il funzionamento della Live Migration e io l'ho usato durante la mia sessione dedicata alle novità nella virtualizzazione per mostrare la configurazione di Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).
Qualcuno mi ha chiesto come è stata fatta tutta la configurazione, quali sono i passi, ecc...
Su questi argomenti ci sono decine di risorse, ma ho pesanto che un video, in italiano, che illustri tutti i passaggi dalla configurazione dei dischi alla Live Migration possa essere utile.

Ecco qui il video... buona visione e a presto.

Giorgio

A quick introduction to HyperV live migration

James O'Neill — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:49:00 GMT

Live Migration for Hyper-V is one of the major changes to Windows Server 2008 R2. In this screen cast we see how it it is configured, how a virtual machine is added to the cluster and what the process of migration looks like from the client's and server's points of view.

Network Load Balancing (NLB) in Windows Server 2008

Adam Bomb — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:01:00 GMT

We throw ‘clustering’ around a lot at Microsoft. There are a few different technologies that we refer to as clustering, but they all serve very different roles:

HPC/Compute Cluster Server
Failover Clustering
Network Load Balancing

We’ve provided a fair amount of info about the first one, we’ve touched on (and will cover more about) the second one, but we’ve never really talked about NLB here on Edge. I thought I’d change that this week.
Wait, is this new? Not really. It’s been around in Windows Server for a long time. There are a couple features that are new for Server 2008 though:
Support for IPv6

A new NLB cluster creation Wizard instead of a control panel app
Better security

What does it do? Network Load Balancing is a way to configure a pool of machines so they take turns responding to requests. It’s most commonly seen implemented in server farms: identically configured machines that spread out the load for a web site, or maybe a Terminal Server farm. You could also use it for a firewall(ISA) farm, vpn access points, really, any time you have TCP/IP traffic that has become too much load for a single machine, but you still want it to appear as a single machine for access purposes.
How does it work? It’s pretty straightforward. After you install NLB on a server, you add two or more machines to a NLB Cluster. The machines are configured with 2 IP addresses: their own private unique one, and a second one that is shared by all the machines in the cluster. The machines all run an algorithm that determines whose turn is next at responding to requests. They also exchange heartbeats with one another, so they all know if one server goes down and won’t allocate any more requests to him. You can have up to 32 machines in a cluster.
You can do some smart stuff with regards to how requests are allocated too. You can set up affinity so that requests from one subnet will be responded to from Server A whenever possible, and that other subnets prefer Server B. Maybe you want 80% of all incoming requests to be handled by Server A, with the rest going to server B. You can do that too.
There are a few other things you can do with affinity:

Single affinity: connections initiated by a given ip address are handled by the same server in the cluster until cluster membership changes. This is useful for those applications that maintain sessions across multiple connections (e.g. E-commerce applications). Note that SSL connections will need single affinity to avoid re-negotiation at every attempt.
No affinity: connections are load-balanced based on originating address and port. This is more efficient, as connections from the same client can be routed to several hosts.
VPN and IPSec affinity: vpn and ipsec sessions will be preserved even if cluster membership changes.
Class C affinity: useful when internet clients access the cluster through proxies that expose the same class-C addresses. Load balancing is based on the class-C subnet portion of the incoming address.

How do I install it? I’ll give you three ways:

From Server Manager, just click Add Feature and then select Network Load Balancing
From a command line, type “ocsetup NetworkLoadBalancingFullServer”
Use ServerManagerCmd! From a command line, type “servermanagercmd –install nlb”

Is there somewhere I can get more information? Of course:
NLB on TechNet
The Clustering/NLB Team Blog

(thanks to Giovanni and Hiroshi for their contributions to this post.)

Windows Server 2008 Clustering [SCREEN CAST]

Neil Hutson — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:59:00 GMT

This week I had a chat with Adam about the new failover clustering capabilities within Windows Server 2008 and he showed this in action. After a discussion on the whiteboard, Adam walked me through the installation of clustering support on Windows Server 2008, which involved setting up the clustered configuration across two machines and finally selecting a clustered service, which is this case was to configure Hyper-V in a clustered environment. After starting the Hyper-V virtual environment on one physical machine, Adam failed over the virtual machine to the second physical machine while still maintaining all the state and the running applications. Pretty damm cool, all in less than a minute.

There is quite a lot of information about Windows Server Clustering in Windows Server 2008.

For more details on the features of the new version, the best place to start is here

For more technical information and a step-by-step guide to setting this up start here More next time.

How to setup iSCSI on Windows Server 2008 [11 mins]

Neil Hutson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:59:00 GMT

This is the second in a series of “How To’s” with Adam Carter. This time around, he provided a quick introduction to iSCSI, which is a technology which is part of Windows Storage Server which allows SCSI commands to be shared over the network to enable cheap and simple network storage options. In this 11min screen cast, Adam walks through iSCSI basics on the white board and then sets up an iSCSI target disk to share on one machine and then connects to this disk over the network to a second machine using the iSCSI initiator. This creates a new disk on the second server machine, which he then formats and puts into action. This is very useful for creating clustering scenarios, reduces the complexity of managing shared nothing SCSI ID’s and can be a very cost effective storage scenario. While the simple setup shown in this video works fine in a lab environment, in real life you would connect to your iSCSI disk using a dedicated high speed network cards on a private network to reduce latency. Adam provided more information on how you can get access to Windows Storage Server and 3rd party iSCSI Target providers in this recent post. Please watch this and comment.

iSCSI!

Adam Bomb — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

I’ve been doing Windows Clustering since back when we used to call it Wolfpack. Clustering is cool, but it can be painful to get it all up and running. Most of that pain often comes from trying to get the shared nothing storage configured properly, which in the old days meant sorting out all your SCSI ID’s for all the devices, or making sure your fiber channel optic cables were clean and connected.

Fortunately, network speeds today are such that we can ease some of that pain by moving the storage connections to Ethernet. That process is made really easy by using iSCSI protocols, which are built in to Vista and Server 2008, and have been available as downloads for XP and Server 2003.

iSCSI

What does it do? Very simply, iSCSI takes commands or requests that the OS would make to a local hard disk, and sends them over the network to a storage array or other target. Disks look like local disks on your machine – you can see them in Disk Management, format them, partition them, etc., but they physically reside as files on the network.

What are the components? There are two:

· the iSCSI Initiator is the app that you run on your client to make the initial connection to the remote disk. This is included by default in Vista and Windows Server 2008

· an iSCSI Target runs on the storage that you’re connecting to. One is typically available for SAN or NAS hardware, and we include one in Windows Storage Server SKU’s. The iSCSI Target let’s you configure what disks are available to connect to, and what machines are allowed to connect.

How do I do it? It’s actually really cool:

· Set up an iSCSI Target. You have a few options. If you have a Windows Storage Server with the Windows Unified Data Storage Server add on (WUDSS), It includes a console that lets you configure iSCSI. There are also a few 3^rd party iSCSI Target apps you can install on Windows Server.

· Configure your iSCSI Disks. On Storage Server, you create some .vhd files, specifying the size. Note that these are just virtual disks, not whole machine images.

· Configure which machines can connect to the iSCSI disks, and any security you want to put in place (you can require that the connection to the target use IPSec, for example)

· Run the iSCSI initiator from the machines you want to make the storage available on. Connect to the Target, specify which disks you want to connect to, and the disks will show up in Disk Management, where you can assign them drive letters, partition them, etc.

Why would I want to do this, again?

· It makes Failover Clustering much, much easier. You can get real failover clustering running in an afternoon on a couple of laptops, if you wanted to.

· In an Enterprise environment, you can easily leverage centralized storage without a capital investment in specialized storage equipment.

Get started

Windows Storage Server is normally available as part of an OEM storage device, but you can download an eval version if you want to take a look. Details are available on the Storage Solutions website, and you can register for eval downloads here. (make sure you select WUDSS to get access to the iSCSI Target components)

There are also a few companies that make iSCSI Targets for Windows. Nimbus, Rocket Division and String Bean are a few of them (disclaimer: I haven’t worked with any of these products and can’t speak to their performance, reliability or support).