Cluster with hyperV hyperconverged
Posted by Cultural_Log6672@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 18 comments
Good morning. I want to create a cluster of two nodes with hyperV in hyperconvergence. I have several questions. Can I perform high availability in this way if one of my two nodes turns off everything is transparent the Vm continue to work on the remaining node? And also is it integrated with hyperV or do I have to pay an additional license for the hyperconverged mode? And do I have to use raid as well?
MrMrRubic@reddit
Two-node failover cluster is possible, but not recommended on S2D. You can run it mostly fine with something like Starwind vSAN. Check this link for info about quorum: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/quorum
With failover cluster, node failure is mostly transparent to the VM (as long as the storage stays online), but you might lose a handful of packets when the VM fires up on the other node.
Failover cluster is not licenced separately, nor is S2D afaik. Starwind vSAN has a free edition but it's limited in functionality, support and use in production.
You must use RAID and/or Storage Spaces for redundancy.
Godcry55@reddit
RAID doesn’t work for S2D unless I am mistaken.
MrMrRubic@reddit
You use hardware RAID for windows boot, but present the data disks directly to OS for S2D.
Godcry55@reddit
True! Thanks for the clarification!
BorysTheBlazer@reddit
Actually, while VSAN Free is self-supported via community forums, you usually get a level of responsiveness there that other vendors only provide in paid plans. Free version is also fully allowed for production use, however, for mission-critical environments, I’d still highly recommend the commercial version for the guaranteed support SLAs.
Here’s a Free vs. Paid comparison table: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan-free-vs-paid
Godcry55@reddit
Depends on your workload but I’d recommend 4 nodes minimum.
Go with storage spaces for the storage pool.
DAC 25GbE SFP minimum.
NISMO1968@reddit
This is actually good advice!
This one… Not so much!
This one’s solid gold too. We’re up 2:1 now, so let’s keep the scoreboard moving!
Godcry55@reddit
Haha sorry I meant storage spaces direct - S2D builds the storage pool automatically.
NISMO1968@reddit
Yeah, I got it right away, and that kinda freaked me out.
Godcry55@reddit
🤣
I had to remediate a S2D cluster where the engineer manually created a storage spaces pool and manually assigned roles with drive letters…
Then he enabled S2D…
Live migrations were never graceful.
NISMO1968@reddit
There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, and definitely even more ways to end up with a half-working, half-assed S2D deployment.
Remnence@reddit
For two nodes you need shared storage and an external witness.
Cultural_Log6672@reddit (OP)
Shared storage is configured directly from hyperV? If I have 30TB of storage in each of my nodes, can I configure it to shared storage?
Remnence@reddit
S2D is technically the solution but I've not heard great things. For only two nodes I think most would suggest Proxmox + Ceph.
Serafnet@reddit
While you can get two nodes working with Proxmox & Ceph, neither is going to really like it.
Ceph in particular gets very spicy when you run with only two hosts.
Remnence@reddit
Yeah, two hosts is just not recommended. Three is typically the minimum for any sort of clustering.
RCTID1975@reddit
Most would recommend a vSAN.
Starwind handles this phenomenally with no issues having 2 hosts.
DerBootsMann@reddit
s2d is pain in the ass , two-node s2d is a nightmare ..