Users Guide

Clustering Implementations for High Availability 11
Figure 2-2. Hyper-V Guest Clustering Across Two Standalone Physical Servers
In Figure 2-2 above, the clustered virtual machines A and B are running on
different physical servers. In this scenario, the workloads being managed by
the clustering software within the VMs are able to offer continued service
even in the case of an unplanned physical server downtime or parent partition
outage.
As in all cluster implementations, the Hyper-V Guest Cluster implementation
also requires that the cluster service running in all the guest OSes have direct
access to a common shared storage. In the case of Hyper-V Guest Cluster, the
only way to provision shared storage that is accessible directly by multiple
VMs is by using iSCSI based storage (Direct Attached SAS and Fiber
Channel Arrays are not supported for Hyper-V Guest Clustering). With the
iSCSI initiators running in the guest operating systems, Hyper-V VMs can
directly talk to the iSCSI storage without going through the storage stack of
the parent partition.
NOTE: The Dell Storage Solutions Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V provides more
detailed information on provisioning iSCSI storage disks directly to Guest OSes.