Hyper-V cluster – Part 7: Custer Shared Volume and manage virtual machines

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Aaron Denton

Aaron Denton has been working in IT for 10 years.He is a CCNP, MCITP, Enterprise Admin and Enterprise Messaging Administrator on Exchange 2007. Follow his blog itprostuff.

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Cluster Shared Volume setup

We’re almost ready to make virtual machines highly available. The last step is to enable Cluster Shared Volumes and assign a volume as a cluster shared volume. With the cluster object selected, click the link in the main pane Enable Cluster Shared Volumes. You will receive an informational message indicating that the storage is only meant to be used for virtual machines.

Hyper-V Cluster - CSV Warning

Now that cluster shared volumes are enabled, let’s make the disk we called cluster shared volume 1 into an actual cluster shared volume.

• Right-click Cluster Shared Volumes in the left pane and select Add Storage.
• Select the disk called cluster shared volume and click OK.
• The disk will now be displayed in both Cluster Shared Volumes and Storage.

With the cluster share volume created, all virtual machine files will be saved to the new directory C:\ClusterStorage\volume1.

Add virtual machines to the cluster

Now that everything is in place, we can add virtual machines to our cluster. There a couple ways you can do this.

• Existing virtual machines should be shut down, vhd files moved to C:\ClusterStorage\volume1, and then have the properties updated.
• With that finished right-click the cluster object in the left pane of Failover Cluster Manager and select Configure a Service or Application.
• Select Virtual Machine and click next.
• Select virtual machines from the list that should be clustered and click Next.
• Click Next and/or Finish until the wizard is finished.

Choose Virtual Machine  - Select the virtual machine(s) you want to cluster

New virtual machines can be created in a much more direct manner.

• Using Failover Cluster Manager, right-click Services and Applications in the left pane, hover Virtual Machines, and select which host the virtual machine should be created on. Although you are picking one host, the VM will automatically be clustered and could be moved to any host in the cluster without need for any further configuration once the creation wizard has finished.
• From here on out the wizard is essentially identical to the wizard you would access from Hyper-V Manager. The only important thing to keep in mind is to make sure the machine location and vhd files is modified to C:\ClusterStorage\volume1. For example, for an IIS server, I might change the location to C:\ClusterStorage\volume1\IIS.

Create new VMs in Failover Cluster Manager - Modify location to cluster shared volume

The final step is to test moving a virtual machine between hosts. With Services and Applications selected in the left pane, right-click a running VM hover Live migrate virtual machine to another node, and select Live migrate to node Host2. After a few moments, FCM will update and show that the current owner is Host 2.

In this final post in the Hyper-V Clustering for Beginner’s series, we enabled and setup cluster shared volumes, added existing and new virtual machines, and tested migration between hosts.