I missed the speaker introductions.  I was meant to be doing the Springboard booth now but it turns out the room was closing 30 minutes before my shift.  I decided to go to a session on my expertise: Live Migration.

Cluster Shared Volume is being discussed as I enter.  CSV is only supported for Hyper-V.  You cannot put SQL on a CSV.  You can put SQL VM’s on CSV.  Still shared nothing.  A Coordination Node owns the SCV and delegates rights.  The Coordination Node role can fail over to other nodes in the cluster.  While this happens there is a brief queuing of I/O.

The speaker stresses that CSV was written and tuned for Hyper-V.  It is NOT to be used for anything else.  In fact, I’ve recently heard of a case where a yellow box AV product scanning the CSV broke Live Migration.  We know that DPM 2007 SP1 cannot back up CSV.  There are significant differences obviously from normal NTFS because of these Hyper-V optimisations.

I/O Connectivity Fault Tolerance.  If a node loses connection to the SAN then it can reroute I/O via the Ethernet via the coordination node to the CSV.  It’s slow but it keeps you running until you use Live Migration to move VM’s from the “down” node or you can repair the issue.  This is out of the box – no configuration required.

They’re advising people to use Serer Core for the parent partition.  It’s easy to spot the people who only ever set stuff up and never live with it.  There’s more to life than the numbers of patches.  There’s the ability to fix things, upgrade things, configure VLAN’s, etc.

They are promoting Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  Yes, you can use lots of tools to manage it remotely from Windows 7.  Fine.  But that’s only OK in a 100% pure MS world.  For me Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is a VDI/Linux solution.  I’d only ever run Windows server VM’s on Enterprise/Datacenter editions with a full installation.  Enterprise/Datacenter is effectively free with 4 or more Windows Server VM’s and Full installation is not such a fat monster – it is also possible to configure/troubleshoot hardware.

There is a GUI now for configuring iSCSI in Server Core.

We get a demo of building a CSV, a VM and doing Live Migration using the Hyper-V console.  We then move onto VMM 2008 R2.

NIC Configuration Recommendations

• NIC for Live Migration 1GB
• Cluster/CSV
• Public for parent
• Public for VM’s