Installing Microsoft Failover Clustering on VMware vSphere 4.1

Installing Microsoft Failover Clustering on VMware vSphere 4.1 with RDMs

This is a quick guide to installing Microsoft Failover Clustering on VMware vSphere 4.1 on 2 VMs across the 2 hosts

Pre-Requisites

Failover Clustering feature is available with Windows Server 2008/R2 Enterprise/Data Center editions. You don’t have this feature with the Standard edition of Windows Server 2008/R2
You also need a form of Shared Storage (FC)
To use the native disk support included in failover clustering, use basic disks, not dynamic disks and format as NTFS
Setup 1 Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller Virtual Machine with Active Directory Services and a Domain
Setup 1 x Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine for Node 1 of the Windows Cluster with 2 NICs
Setup 1 x Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine for Node 2 of the Windows Cluster with 2 NICs

Instructions

Make sure all Virtual Machine are joined to the domain
Make sure all Virtual Machines are fully updated and patched with the latest S/W updates
You may need to adjust your Windows Firewall
On the first network adapter rename this as Public and on the second adapter, rename this as Private or MSCS Heartbeat
On the first network adapter, add the static IP address, Subnet Mask, Gateway and DNS
On the second network adapter, just add the IP Address and Subnet Mask
Go back to the original screen and untick the following boxes
Clear the Client for Microsoft Networks
Clear the File and Printer Sharing
Clear QOS Packet Scheduler
Clear Link Layer Toplogy checkboxes

After you configured the IP addresses on every network adapter verify the order in which they are accessed. Go to Network Connections click Advanced > Advanced Settings and make sure that your LAN connection is the first one. If not click the up or down arrow to move the connection on top of the list. This is the network clients will use to connect to the services offered by the cluster.

Adding Storage

I am assuming that your Storage Admin has already pre-created the LUNs that we are going to assign

You will see that there are 4 LUNs available. This is because I want to set up Microsoft Failover Clustering with SQL Failover clustering and I need 4 disks for the Quorum, SQL Data, SQL Logs and MSDTC

Select to store with the Virtual Machine. When an RDM is used, a small VMDK file is created on a VMFS Datastore and is a pointer to the RDM. This will be used when you configure the 2nd node in the cluster

Select Compatibility Mode. Physical Compatibility Mode is required for Microsoft Failover Cluster across hosts

Review and Finish
Because you added the new disk as a new device on a new bus, you now have a new virtual SCSI controller which will default to the recommended type, LSI Logic SAS for Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2

In Edit Settings, you need to click on the newly created SCSI Controller and select Physical for SCSI Bus Sharing. This is required for failover clustering to detect the storage as usable

You now need to repeat this action for all RDMs you need to add
When you have finished adding all the RDMs you should see the following in Edit Settings for the VM

Next we need to add the RDMs to the second VM which is a slightly different procedure
Click Edit Settings on the 2nd VM and Add Hard Disk

To select the RDM Pointer file browse to the datastore and folder for the VM where you created the pointer file on the first VM

Select the same SCSI Virtual Device Node you setup on the first VM for the first RDM

Next you will need to set the SCSI Bus Sharing Mode to Physical and verify that the type is LSI Logic SAS

Configuring the storage on the VMs

Power on Node/VM1
Connect to Node1/VM1
Launch Server Manager and navigate to Disk Management under Storage
In Disk Manager you will see the new disks as being offline
Right click each disk and select Online and if necessary right click again and select Initialise Disk then select the MBR partition type
Create a simple volume on all 4 disks which should then look like the below

Next Power on and log into Node2/VM2
Open Disk Management and right click each disk and select Online. Once the Disks are online you will see the volume labels and status
If the disks have been assigned the next available drive letters then you will need to change the drive letters to match the letters you assigned on Node1/VM1
The disks will now look identical to Node1/VM1

Install Microsoft Failover Clustering

You will need to install Failover Clustering on both nodes as per below procedure

On the first Node1/VM1 click Start > Administrative Tools > Failover Cluster Manager
Click on Validate a Cluster

Validation will run a variety of tests against your virtual hardware including the storage and networking to verify if the hardware is configured correctly to support a failover cluster. To pass all tests, both nodes must be online and the hardware must be configured correctly

Your configuration is now validated and you can check the reports for anything which is incorrect

If you want to install SQL Server clustering, we will need to install a MSDTC Service
Go to Services and Applications – right click and select “Configure a service or application