Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cluster On Two 1U SR1695GPRX And A Promise VTrak E610sD A Go . . . Sort Of

Well, after a lot of working through the various steps required we did manage to stand up a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 based cluster on our two node setup connected to the Promise VTrak.

The set up process needs to be refined and possibly the hardware setup may need to be tweaked.

We did manage to do a successful Live Migration of all of the VMs running on the cluster but we had a number of funky behaviours that need to be ironed out first:

1. Disk performance was very poor.
2. The Promise VTrak had a lot of initiator log on and log off messages.
3. Microsoft MPIO may not have set in properly.
4. SBS 2011 VM kept losing network connectivity.

We suspect that the primary source of the problems above are the drivers and possibly the Adaptec card.

So, we are starting fresh with an up to date driver set (we used Intel ProSet v16.2 in the last run through and now v16.3 with the same error). So, we may toss version 16 of the Intel ProSet drivers altogether if we experience the same network connectivity problems.

We suspect that the Adaptec card may not have what it takes to make this configuration run. We have a couple of LSi 3442R-E SAS cards on the way to swap out the Adaptec cards if today’s run through still has MPIO and SAS connectivity issues.

The LSi cards are due to arrive tomorrow from LSi.

Our configuration post for this setup is here: Hyper-V Two Node Cluster Setup On Intel Server Systems and Promise VTrak RAID Subsystem – Part 1.

Every post related to this trial run through will be found under the following tag since this is the base Intel Server System platform that we will be using: Intel SR1695GPRX

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