I’ve had some testing to do lately. We want to see what 2008 server could bring to us, and more specifically, if we could replace our current very old NAS header by a 2008 Storage server cluster. And to carry out that piece of work, I decided to go for virtualization.

So what do you have to know when you want to go for a cluster of two Windows server virtualized on ESXi 3.5? You probably already know that the quorum is a disk shared between the nodes of the cluster and contain the cluster config data (of course there is different way for clustering a windows server but her I’m talking about the only one you can do with 2 servers: the standard quorum cluster). In order to share the quorum, you’ve got two possibilities.

You an either go for provisioning a SAN disk an attach it to your hosts, or use a virtual disk created in ESX. The second way got two path. If you use Windows 2003 server, you can directly share do it by using a flat disk and a LSI Logic SCSI controller. But if you want to do this on a Windows 2008 sever, because it support only SCSI 3 Persistent Reservations and ESXi3.5 only V2, yo have to use an iSCSI initiator within the guest as well as a ISCSI storage target.

I won’t describe how to attach a SAN disk to your windows as there is no point to do so, if you don’t have an IBM SAN with SVC and mcdata switches, it will be completely different…

So I’ll describe the first and easiest way on that post, and the win 2008 way in another post.

Method 1: use a shared virtual disk

you first need to create a flat disk. You can’t do that within the infrastructure client, so we’ll use the remote CLI. The command is:

vmkfstools.pl –c <Size of Volume in Bytes> –d thick –a lsilogic <path to Virtual disk>
which gives
vmkfstools.pl –c 4G –d thick –a lsilogic [DATASTORE1] cluster/quorum.vmdk

Make sure you’re on the good directory before you type the command (C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VI Remote CLI\bin by default).

You may also want to add your profile –sessionfile <path_of_profile> or if you don’t have a profile, you can either specify the server you want to reach in the command –server <esxi_server> or by setting an environment variable: set VI_SERVER=<your_server_name>

Then you’ll just have to attach your new disk (add > hard disk > use an existing Vdisk …) and an LSI logic SCSI controller to both of the VM. Make sure your disk is connected to the good controller if you’ve got more than one. The bus sharing of the controller must be set to virtual or physical, depending on your needs.

There you are! You can start configuring your windows 2003 cluster! But as I said before this doesn’t work for windows 2008… So the 2nd par will explain you the workaround.

On Windows 2008, hibernation is activated by default for system with less than 4GB of ram. It’s not like if microsoft thought your server may want to take a nape but in case that there is a power failure and switch to UPS. It make sense, why not, but it’s not useful for everyone. The file hiberfil.sys is created by default on the system drive even if it’s not used in order for the system to make sure there will be always enouth room. You may want to just move the file to another drive, but unfortunately you can’t… Or at list i didn’t manage to do it. You can still turn hivernation off though. En even change the size of the file (doesn’t really make sense as it is created by default at the size of your ram). Here the command you can run on a command prompt with admin right:

change the size of the file (this is a percentage of your ram – min 50%)

POWERCFG -H -Size <PercentSize>

Desactivate hibernation

POWERCFG -H OFF

Learn more about power management

POWERCFG /?

Red Hat has published it’s results from the first quarter and the only thing we can say is that RH is doing well! results up 11% from the year ago quarter. The net income for the quarter is 18.5 millions, a 7.1% growth.
This is realy good and show that the open sources technologies get more and more interest from companies, especially on recession !
An other interesting figure is that now 61% of the sales are made by the business partner network. It show that the can rely on more that just themself and they need it to keep growing.

An interesting annonce was that they annonced the beta release of a portfolio of products around virtualisation (Red Hat hypervisor is KVM).