Hyper-V Failover Cluster with Windows 8 – Well, Maybe Not Quite Yet

We had a few scheduling changes today so we utilized the little bit of extra time to see if we could stand a Hyper-V Failover Cluster up quickly using Windows 8.

First we will set up our NIC teaming.

Then, we need to figure out how to set up our MPIO storage which is not really too intuitive at this point as “MPIO” does not come up in any search results.

Ah … there you are:

Skip the Role Install step and:

And:

Apparently a reboot was not required:

Metro then has an MPIO icon that brings up the MPIO Control Panel.

Since our connection is SAS based we clicked the check mark and the Add button and eventually we saw:

After a reboot we saw the following on both nodes:

Okay, we have our storage. We then needed to set it up.

Once configured we set all of the shared storage disks to Offline.

Next up, setting up the teaming services in Windows 8 for the four NICs:

We make sure to click on the server name and then start the teaming wizard under the TASKS button near the top right of the TEAMS section. Note that we disconnected two cables to quickly find out which pair is which on the server.

We are now good to go to install the Hyper-V Role!

Once our servers had rebooted we moved on to the Failover Clustering Feature:

Oops:

Click Add Roles and Features link to the right shown below and:

Okay, so there may be some weirdness going on there. These are early bits so no worries.

When binding the vSwitch to the appropriate team make sure to take note of the following:

Because of the following:

The driver name is referenced when binding the vSwtich.

And there we stop.

No matter how we try to go about getting the Failover Clustering feature installed we are stopped in our tracks. :(

So, somewhere along the way we must have done some of the steps out of order to the point that the OS has taken exception to the way things are. Or, we hit a bug:

The above is a Snip from the DSIM.log under %windir%\Logs.

So, for now we have a note into Microsoft to see if there is another way to get things working or if we need to start fresh and run through the steps a little differently.

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.