Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

Vince — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 22:49:59 GMT

Question sir...I watched your entire videos relating to the Virtual Server R2 HostClustering and noticed that the cluster nodes are laptop and desktop. I'm no cluster expert, but I though cluster nodes are "suppose" to be identical. I'd like to this to my small client's setup due to hardware differences / costs. Basically, with what you did is okay to do...although I know not recommended or best practices cluster still will work for non-similar hardware (host hardware). Thanks - great technical BLOG.

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

jhoward — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:43:50 GMT

Hi Vince

Putting support to one side, to fail over a VM from one node to another in a planned downtime requires the VM to be put in "saved state" and restarted on another node. For this to work, there are several requirements from a processor perspective. It so happened that both the desktop and laptop machines were Intel Pentium 4 3.2 MHz processor with the same stepping (although one was mobile, this did not matter). I put more information on this on my blog a few days ago: http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2005/12/19/416244.aspx. For _unplanned_ failover, idential hardware is not so much of a requirement as the VM is restarted on another node. So from that perspective, it would have worked if one machine were running an AMD processor and the other an Intel processor.

As you saw, you _can_ cluster together very successfully two quite different machines with different network cards and still get high availability with virtual machines, it's just very unlikely to be supported.

The best place to look for requirements for _supported_ cluster environments is following links from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/clustering/default.mspx.

Hope that helps.
Regards,
John.

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

Brian — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:01:48 GMT

John, how do you put multiple servers in the havm.vbs

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

jhoward — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 05:35:49 GMT

Brian - it should be exactly the same as building a cluster of more machines - havm.vbs is simply the failover script. If you have look at technet for info on building clusters, that's the process to follow. havm.vbs won't care regardless of number of nodes.
Cheers,
John.

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

Brian — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:54:27 GMT

I guess I was a little vague. I actually meant how can I, if I can, attach multiple vmc's to one script.

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

jhoward — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:43:17 GMT

Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware that isn't possible using the script as it stands - I would test it, but have no demo kit available. When you configure the script resource, you specify the name of the VM it is failing over. With a little tweaking, you could _in theory_ have multiple parameters with names of multiple VMs, but this would deviate from the supported script - and I re-iterate, I haven't tested this. The supported solution would be to have multiple groups, one per virtual machine.
Cheers,
John.

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

Brian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:53:38 GMT

Jon, before we went to host clustering for virtual server, we had our virtual's set up to boot at intervals. Is there any way to tell the havm.vbs script to delay the resume of a machine after the resource comes online?

re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

jhoward — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:46:10 GMT

Brian

You should be able to do this in a couple of ways. One is to introduce a new resource to the cluster group which is a generic script with a single line "wscript.sleep 5000" for example which will cause a 5 second delay. Then make sure that the havm script is dependent on the delay script. You can get more inventive by using another cluster private "variable" such that havm already uses to define how long to delay for.

The other solution is to hard code the delay into the havm script. However, probably best to leave that well alone and use the generic script as-is.

Hope that helps
Cheers,
John.

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re: Blogcast: Virtual Server 2005 R2 Host Clustering How To - Part 5 of 5

Abe — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:21:51 GMT

John,
In response to the Havm.vbs posted by Brian, would it matter if you copied havm.vbs to same directory and renamed it to havm2.vbs and associated the second VS to havm2.vbs (VS1 to havm.vbs and VS2 to havm2.vbs), which would allow for both VS's to run using the same scripted commands in files with different names?

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