Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Windows Hosting : Clustering help

[firehawk1010]

Hi. totally new to clustering and reading document/articles one after the other and getting confused.

im trying to setup a demo VM environment. After various attempts I think I got the cluster working. (configured at least)

1xDC
2xNodes
1xVSAN

WS2008R2 EE + all updates.

using StarWind for the iSCSI. Created 1 harddisk/virtual disk using this software (2GB).

its showing that all the computers are connected to the iSCSI.

purpose of this cluster: to demo what happens when Node1 (or 2) goes down, to get the other node up and running and continue doing its job.

Can anyone please tell me (without linking to more documents!) what I am missing and how to set up IIS clustered?

Maybe im missing something in terms of my configuration, I dont know in which case please do tell me!

Many thanks!

[Dave Parish]

I've heard of and setup windows using the high availability options and using hpc. For IIS I've seen this article used for IIS failover http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970759 but it's scripted. To do it normally you'd just setup each "node" as a separate DNS with shared storage. You might want to set it up as local storage, shared storage replication, and then replicating the shared storage onto local storage on the backup (redundant node) server.

[firehawk1010]

Thanks. I appreciate that.

however my knowledge on these matters is very weak.

I am looking just for a very basic VM environment (using VMWare but not that it matters to be honest). the DC is also a DNS.
2 nodes are clustered
1 is a VSAN.

firstly, how do I make sure the iSCSI is correctly up and running? would the nodes in the cluster see the disk? only 1 node sees it, the other does not and says that there is a policy set by the administrator and its showing as offline. The VSAN image also shows it as online and mapped to "E:\" just like the other node in the cluster.

*headache*. so tired trying to set up the environment. im a n00b

[Dave Parish]

i think the main issue is that the starwind iscsi target usually only allows one active connection. if you failed over from node one it wouldn't auto inherently connect on the 2nd node to the target. I believe you'd have to go through the setup process again (without rebooting the 2nd node) or reboot the node to reinitialize the target. The only way to do it is to setup a lun on a better grade iscsi target using something like netapp or using nfs.

[firehawk1010]

great. thanks for that. it helps big time for me.

so, can you advise on what software to download/install and get it up and running so that the iSCSI does what it should do on clustered? in addition the configuration required?

[firehawk1010]

ok lets take a step back. seems like I have not setup the clustering environment correctly somewhere and I dont know how or what.

Clustering IP: 192.168.1.18

I can ping from all computers including within cluster fine.

but when Node1 reboots, and I try to ping it from the DC (not in a cluster) then it cant ping it. its unreachable. Same from within Node2 until Node1 comes back.

Node1 has an IP of 192.168.1.3
Node2 has an IP of 192.168.1.4
VSAN has an IP of 192.168.1.5
DC has an iP of 192.168.1.2

Cluster: 192.168.1.18

Before clustering, all validations pass 100% green, then was able to cluster the 2 nodes together

?! What am I doing wrong?

[Collabora]

It looks like you are clustering IIS by means of clustering just the IIS services or plain failover clustering. Have you added the NLB feature?

[firehawk1010]

nope.

anyway I managed to get it working. not sure how to be honest but it works. I think I uninstalled the starwind stuff, reinstalled it but also configured the network adapters so I had another one for iSCSI on each of the machines... and it worked.