Thursday 26 April 2012

Production Hyper-V Failover Cluster on an Intel Modular Server Pictures

The following are some shots of one of the Intel Modular Server based Hyper-V Failover Clusters that we have deployed.

image

 

This particular three node Hyper-V Failover Cluster is set up with 14x 146GB 15K Seagate SAS drives configured in three Storage Groups in the built-in IMS SAN. One for the Hyper-V OSs, one for VM OS partitions, and another for a high I/O SQL database setup.

The IMS has both SAS Storage Controllers and both Ethernet Switch Modules installed. Each Compute Module has a mezzanine card installed to bring the total Gigabit NIC connections to four.

The Promise VTrak E310sD was added about a year later to open storage up for the SBS 2008 VM and also add Windows Desktop OS based VMs for a VDI deployment.

There are two Trip-Lite Rack Mount enclosures in this deploy. Unfortunately APC did not have a 24U unit available when this deployment was done so we had to run with them. APC is the vendor of choice for our rack enclosure and UPS needs.

The IMS, Intel Server System SR1630HGP 1U 1P that provides standalone DC services, the Promise VTrak, and the backup destination drives are housed in one.

The second APC Rack Mount enclosure has all of the APC UPS components:

image

A 6000KV head unit with four additional 192V battery packs give the cluster about 8-10 hours of run time. Near the top of the stack is the 208V to 120V transformer. A network management card is installed in the UPS head unit for total power control and monitoring.

A separate set of SUA1500RM2U APC UPS units are used for the networking, 1U DC, and the backup destination drives to give us some power control granularity.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Have you played with Intel Modular Server Virtualisation Manager on your intel blade chassis?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

We just saw a bit of information on the Intel virtualization platform that is being built into the CMM on the IMS.

Currently it only supports offline migration from node to node. They are in the process of getting a Live Migration feature enabled.

We will stick with Hyper-V and soon System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center 2012.

Philip