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Over the last few days, I’ve been testing a Windows cluster in a virtual environment. Of course, the whole point of a cluster is a highly available system running on specialised hardware, but for test purposes a virtual environment can be really handy.
It’s a bit tricky, but it works! The information on how to achieve this is contained in two TechRepublic articles by Steven Warren:
[…] year, I blogged about building a Windows cluster using VMware. Since then, new versions of VMware have made this more difficult/expensive (as it no longer works […]
Cool. I was looking at setting up 20 nodes based on Mini ITX machines.
Here:
http://www.mini-itx.com/
Regards
Ciril,
I just wanted to make you aware that I wrote this post three years ago and the virtualisation product space has moved on a bit since then!
Mark
As you mentioned in your comment above, the virtualization world has moved on quite a bit since you pointed to these articles by Steven Warren on how to build an MSCS cluster with VMware.
Oddly enough though, I still don’t find any resources that describe how to do this in modern versions of VMware (such as Workstation 5.x, Server 1.x, or ESX 3.x), and Steven Warren’s articles are no longer available on TechRepublic.
Would you be so kind as to bring this laggard up-to-speed on how this should be done in today’s virtualization world, using a modern VMware platform?
Carole,
Basically, shared SCSI storage is the problem – these days you would create a cluster using iSCSI or fibre channel attached storage. If it’s just a test and development environment, as I was describing when I originally wrote this (e.g. using VMware Workstation on your PC) then a software iSCSI environment will do. For a more heavyweight solution then your storage choice will be important. In the case of ESX, then the VMware file system is specifically designed for clustered operations.
HTH, Mark
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