toby herring

I'm setting up a virtual cluster (Win2k3 Ent) to do some prototyping and
proof-of-concept work, and I've run into a problem. I have been able to
successfully set up a cluster (two nodes) with a shared Quorum drive on a
shared SCSI bus.

For the POC I need more than one shared drive, preferably 3 (Quorum,
Active1, Active2, as I'm setting up an Active/Active cluster.) But I have
not, for the life of me, been able to get two shared drives working on
shared SCSI bus, much less 3.

Anyone have any experience with this, or a pointer to some useful
do***entation along these lines?

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Toby Herring
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ben armstrong [msft]

Hi Toby,

This is a limitation in Virtual Server today. You can only attach one
disk to a shared SCSI bus.
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Cheers,
Benjamin Armstrong
===============================
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toby herring

Doesn't that make it kind of useless for testing cluster-aware applications?
Seems odd to me, considering that's one of the uses that the marketing
materials are pushing.

I found an old do***ent on the web that says that you can put up to 7 disks
on each SCSI adapter, which makes sense if it's supposed to be an adapter.
But I just tried that and it failed, so apparently the do***ent was wrong.

Is it possible to set up more than one shared SCSI bus between two virtual
machines? The do***ent I found says that you can put up to 4 SCSI adapters
in a VM. Can more than one of them be a shared bus? Does it actually work
to install more than one adapter? I've tried setting up multiple shared
SCSI buses, but so far I've had no luck getting that to work, either.

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Toby Herring
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ralph kuhn

.... yes, its possible. I'm running here a cluster with one SCSI-Adapter
for the OS per Node (not shared) and three SCSI-Adapter with one Disk
per Adapter on the shared bus, and all is running fine!

Be aware of the SCSI-Adapter-Id on every node. I've set all
SCSI-Adapter-IDs on Node A to 6 and on Node B to 7.

Best regards
Ralph Kuhn
MCSE (NT4) - MCP W2K-Cluster

toby herring

Thanks, Ralph. I finally got this working around midnight last night. I
now finally have a virtual cluster set up with a shared quorum drive, and
one shared "application" drive per node for my application groups to use.

Now I've got to figure out how to implement load-balancing across the
cluster, but I think I'm going to handle that programmatically.

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Toby Herring
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Need a Second Life?
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