Setup Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Cluster

This week Microsoft released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Windows Server 8 Beta. You can get the software here:

• Windows Server 8 Beta
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Windows Server 8 brings a lot of new features to Hyper-V and Clustering. I will try to get some more information and how-to’s about the new features in the next couple of days.

Here is a small guide how you can setup a basic Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Clsuter via iSCSI. This covers only basics and should help users to setup a Hyper-V Cluster for testing very quickly.

Setup the Hyper-V Hosts

1. Configure the Hyper-V hosts with Hostname, IP Address, Domain
   I still create the Cluster with the following Network Adapters

   Network Adpater	Traffic
   Management	Domain, RDP,…
   VMNET	Network for Virtual Machine traffic
   LiveMigration	Live Migration traffic
   CSV	CSV traffic
   ISCSI01	iSCSI traffic
   ISCSI02	iSCSI traffic

2. Add the Hyper-V role, the Failover Cluster Feature and the MPIO feature.
   You can do this via Server Manager or via Powershell

   Add-WindowsFeature Hyper-V
   Add-WindowsFeature Failover-Clustering
   Add-WindowsFeature Multipath-IO

3. Install the latest patches via Windows Update
4. Configure the Hyper-V Virtual Switch for your Virtual Machine Network. (You can do this via Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell.

   Get-Command –Module Hyper-V

   

5. Enable MPIO support for iSCSI devices
   
6. Connect the iSCSI storage via iSCSI (This works like in Windows Server 2008 R2)
   
7. Format the disk via Computer Management, diskpart or PowerShell.
   With the PowerShell command “Get-Disk” you can list all availible disks and with Get-Command –Module Storage you can list all storage related PowerShell cmdlets.
   

Create Cluster

1. Now you can you can open the Failover Cluster Manager to create your Cluster
   
2. Click on “Create Cluster” and select the your cluster nodes
   
3. Now you run the Cluster Validation Wizard
   
4. In Windows Server 8 the Validation Wizard does also test the Hyper-V Configuration of your nodes.
   
5. After you have passed all the test you can go to the next step and create your Cluster. If the Validation Report shows some Warning and Errors you should fix them first.
   
6. Now enter the Cluster Name and Cluster IP Address
   
7. Now if very thing worked out, you can now start to work with your Cluster
   
8. Now you can add the Available Storage to the Cluster Shared Volumes, so you can add Virtual Machines to the storage
   
9. With a right click on Roles you can create a Virtual Machine
   
10. Now when you create the Virtual Machine you have to choose one of the Cluster Shared Volumes. The Cluster Shared Volumes are availible on every Cluster node on C:\ClusterStorage\*
    

This is a very small how to how you can create a Hyper-V Cluster with Windows Server 8 beta. Basically it is not really different to Windows Server 2008 R2 or Hyper-V R2, but it brings a couple of great new features to Hyper-V and Failover Clustering.