Hyper-V R2 Cluster Pre-Deployment Tips
 by Alex Khassanov,, CMS Consulting Senior Virtualization Consultant MCITP: EA,MCTS:SCVMM, MCTS:Hyper-V, MCTS:Sharepoint, MCSE, MCT, CCSP, CCA
In the fall of 2009 I was lucky enough to implement an array of R2 Microsoft products shortly after the official release. The project included a three-node Failover Cluster based on Windows 2008 R2 running Hyper-V R2 on each cluster node, SCVMM 2007 R2 in VM and SCOM 2007 R2 in VM. In this two part article, I’ll concentrate on the important things to consider while designing, implementing and testing Hyper-V 2008 R2 cluster and SCVMM 2007 R2 server. The 1st of 2 articles will help organizations understand the best practices when it comes to designing a Hyper-V 2008 R2 cluster, as well as provide tips for pre-deployment. The 2nd article will provide organizations a set of deployment and post-deployment tips on Hyper-V 2008 R2 clusters, as well as tips on deploying System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). If you have any questions, I welcome your feedback and can be reached at alexk@cms.ca.
Please click here to view the 'Hyper-V 2008 R2 Cluster Design Considerations' portion of this article.
1. Once Design is ready, compile and complete the configuration checklist. You might need input from the hardware/software provisioning team, network team, and SAN team. The more information you can gather in advance means less delay and frustration you’ll likely experience during the deployment.
The following items should be included in the checklist:
- Data Network switches, VLANs (number of ports, port configuration)
- Management Network switch, VLAN (number of ports, port configuration)
- Cluster/Live Migration Network switch, VLAN (number of ports, port configuration)
- AD accounts and groups for installation and management
- DNS settings
- SAN Windows 2008 R2 compatibility
- SAN multi-path IO availability
- FC/iSCSI switch (number of switches, ports)
- FC/iSCSI HBA Windows 2008 R2 compatibility
- FC/iSCSI Target configuration
- LUNs configuration (Witness Disk, VM Storage Disk, SCVMM Library)
- Virtual Networks (Name, IP ranges)
- Hyper-V Cluster configuration (Name, IP address)
- Hyper-V Host configuration (hardware, number of NICs, RAM, HDD subsystem, FQDN, IP configuration)
2. By the time the checklist is ready, you should have a pretty good idea of how the Hyper-V R2 Cluster will look like in detail. At this point, you should engage the other IT teams to prepare the existing environment including AD, DNS, VLANs, SANs, network and fiber switches.
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