Tag Archives: clustering

VCAP-DCA Study Notes – 4.3 Supporting MS Clustering in vSphere

The main guide for this section is the ‘Setup for Failover clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service’ whitepaper. It’s a difficult topic to test in a lab unless you’re lucky enough to have FC in your lab! Very little has changed in regards to running MSCS on VMware since the VI3 days so if you’re familiar with that (and it was on the VCP syllabus) then don’t read any further! If you want a refresher however (and a few tidbits which are new to vSphere 4.1), read on….

Knowledge

  • Identify MSCS clustering solution requirements
  • Identify the three supported MSCS configurations

Skills and Abilities

  • Configure Virtual Machine hardware to support cluster type and guest OS
  • Configure a MSCS cluster on a single ESX/ESXi Host
  • Configure a MSCS cluster across ESX/ESXi Hosts
  • Configure standby host clustering

Tools & learning resources

Supported MSCS configurations

Three options;

  • Cluster in a box
  • Cluster across boxes
  • Standby (one physical node, one virtual node)

Solution requirements

Physical hardware

One of the main requirements is a FC SAN (this is one of the rare features which doesn’t work with NFS).

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