Friday, November 30, 2012

Hyper-V 3.0 with SOFS

I've tested Hyper-V clusters on WS2012 using Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) as SAN alternative for application server clusters like Hyper-V. My setup is as follows:
New VMs are created using Failover Cluster manager and attached to the SMB share on the SOFS cluster. I've also tested Quick and Live Migration over SMB3.0.

Here is the link for all necessary step-by-step. Please take note that SOFS is not suitable for all situations, especially for frequent small meta changes in files e.g. end-user file sharing etc (see "When to use Scale-Out File Server")

You might just ask why don't I attach the iSCSI LUN directly to the Hyper-V cluster i.e. 2 nodes instead of 4? Yes, I could also do.  I am trying to learn more about using SOFS. In future, I could just buy the cheaper non-RAID SAS disk arrays e.g. Dell MD12xx and directly attached them directly to SOFS using simple PCIe (i.e. non-RAID SAS HBA) to replace SAN storage for virtualization. See below TechNet Dell-Windows Server 2012 slide:



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