Virtual cluster

nel

Has anyone setup a virtual cluster as yet? im contemplating trying to study for this exam ontop of my degree and was just wondering as ive never touched clustering before.

how hard is the exam?

ive read the first 100 pages of my syngress book and it seems like alot of theory. is this the case? i done the 291 a few months back so dns etc should be fresh (kind of!)

JdotQ

I was just thinking about this as well. I'm not sure if it's possible to setup a cluster in a VM environment -- can anyone confirm this is possible??

I'm just getting through the first chapter in the Syngress book, and it's 99.9% theory (most of it is common sense). I hope it picks up soon. I guess I'm used to the MS Press style of just pounding you with information

royal

I set up a CCR cluster in a VM Workstation environment since both Exchange 2007 servers use Direct Attached Storage (DAS). VMware Server and ESX have shared disk support for building clusters in VM.

Here's an article on how to configure a cluster using Virtual Server:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/virtualserver/deploy/cvs2005.mspx

nel

hi fella's....

Well jdotq, ive read the first 100 pages and it hasnt picked up yet

Would it be possible to create a scsi array in vmware as a shared storage and point the cluster to that?

JdotQ

royal wrote:

I set up a CCR cluster in a VM Workstation environment since both Exchange 2007 servers use Direct Attached Storage (DAS). VMware Server and ESX have shared disk support for building clusters in VM.

Here's an article on how to configure a cluster using Virtual Server:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/virtualserver/deploy/cvs2005.mspx

Thanks for the link, royal. I'll have to read over that - hopefully it's somewhat easy in VMware. You mentioned it's possible with VMware Server & ESX, any idea if it's possible with VMware Workstation?

nel wrote:

hi fella's....

Well jdotq, ive read the first 100 pages and it hasnt picked up yet

Would it be possible to create a scsi array in vmware as a shared storage and point the cluster to that?

Well, sounds like I'll be doing a lot of skimming

dynamik

This may be oversimplifying things, but couldn't you just make a share somewhere and map drives on both machines to it?

I'm not at this point yet, so maybe there are some obvious reasons that will not work. This one is coming up next for me, so I'm curious to see if VMWare Workstation will meet all my needs.

GJB

Hi Guys

I found this PDF useful

http://www.exchange-mail.org/articles/VMware clustering 1.0.pdf

Its a step by step guide for VM Clustering with VM Workstation

cacharo

Link was broken for me. Very interesting read though.

Here is the working link

http://www.exchange-mail.org/articles/VMware%20clustering%201.0.pdf

royal

dynamik wrote:

This may be oversimplifying things, but couldn't you just make a share somewhere and map drives on both machines to it?

I'm not at this point yet, so maybe there are some obvious reasons that will not work. This one is coming up next for me, so I'm curious to see if VMWare Workstation will meet all my needs.

You need disks in the Logical Disk Manager for Clustering to work. Can't do shares.

VMWare Workstation will need your need for CCR, but for 70-293, it's SCC which you'll need real shared disks. You could use a separate server and install the 30-day trial of RocketDivision Starwind if you want to give iSCSI a shot for setting up shared disks. Might as well just use VMWare Server temporarily for shared disk support instead just for when you need to learn about clustering.