Microsoft Azure AZ-801 — Section 8: Implement and manage Storage Spaces Direct Part 2

49. Configure storage for failover clustering

Real quick, I want to say a couple of things before we get started too hardcore into clustering. Clustering is something that can be a huge pain to deal with on virtual machines, especially if you don’t have a lot of memory. So, I just want to give you a heads up that I’m going to show you in just a second how to create checkpoints and all that. You definitely want to do that. And if you go through and you do a lot of like rebooting of your virtual machine, sometimes that can affect the clusters and call some issues. I want you to know I can’t fix every little cluster problem that students run across here. I get messaged a lot about these types of things, and there’s just no way for me to troubleshoot every little cluster problem that you may have.

You can message me if you like, and I’ll definitely try to help you. But I can’t promise you I can fix your problem unless I was sitting right there in front of your machine. So, my advice is to make sure you create the checkpoint like I’m about to show you. And if something goes wrong, just revert back and start over. Follow the videos step by step, and then you can revert back and start over. Because again, clustering is a pretty fickle little technology, especially if you don’t have a lot of memory on your virtual machines and you can have services stop like the iSCSI service can just stop on you, or the cluster servers can just stop if you don’t have enough memory. So, if you’ve added too much on to your machine and you’re using up all your memory, you could run into that problem.

Now, as we get into working with clustering here, first thing I’ve done is I’ve just shut down my Server1. My domain router is up and running, but here’s what I recommend. I recommend right clicking and creating a checkpoint. And if you’re ever going to do this, the other thing is you might want to go to settings, go to checkpoints and set it to standard checkpoints. You can delete all the checkpoints that are there first, if you want, it’ll merge them together.

But at that point you create a checkpoint and then create a checkpoint of your domain controller. In this way, you can always revert back to before you created the cluster because this is going to take up a lot of memory. It is going to slow things down. The next thing I’m going to do is go to Settings and I’m just going to give myself some more memory. I’m kind of pushing my system to its limit here, but just to make things go a little faster, you can probably get away with just the three gigs on that one, but I’m going to set it to four.

Now, I’m also going to go here to Settings on my Server1 and I’m going to go to iSCSI controller and I’m going to add an additional hard drive here, and I’m just going to call it clusterdisk1. All right. We’ll just set that to 50 gigs. And we’ll add that. And then I’m going to add another one here. So, go up here, add another hard drive. I’m just going to call this cluster disk2. All right. So, I left a 127, but that’s okay because it’s a dynamic, expanding disk.

So, we have two disks there now. Click Okay. And I’m now going to make sure your DC is up and running. I’m now going to go ahead and start this up and I’ll give it a moment. I’ll pause, recording, and then I’ll connect into it. All right, now it’s done rebooting, so I’m going to go into Server Manager here and I’m going to manage add roles and features. We’re going to click Next, Next, Next. I’m going to go to the feature screen and I’m going to go ahead and choose the under. I’m sorry I went too far back to roles, file and stored services and we’re going to add the iSCSI Target server. All right. So, we’re going to go ahead and add that. Click Install and I’m going to go ahead and do that on the domain controller as well. So, I’m going to jump over to the DC. Connect into that. Which I thought I had logged on to you, but I hadn’t yet. So, let me go ahead and log on to that. Okay, so the DC is popping up on the screen here. Slowly but surely. There we go. All right. And we’re loading up Server Manager. We’re going to do the same thing on the DC, so I’m just going to install the iSCSI target service here. Okay, So I’m going to go to manage add roles and features. Next, Next, Next, and expand file and storage services. And scroll down. We have iSCSI Target Server. Next, Next and Install.

So, while that’s installing, we’re going to jump back over to Server1. So, here we are in Server1 and you can see it is still going. So, I’ll just pause the recording until that gets done.

Now, that is done, I’m going to hit Close. And we’re going to go over to file and storage services. We’re going to click on disks. And just waiting on that to load. So, our two new disks are both showing up right here. We’re just going to right click and say bring online. These were added through Hyper-V just a moment ago. All right. So, if we come over here to iSCSI. This is going to create an ESXi virtual disk, non-iSCSI virtual disk is going to be a disk that two or more computers can share. They can link to it just like in a storage area network. And our cluster, once we actually do set up a cluster, the cluster will be able to use that for things like the disk witness, or we could actually use it for file shares and stuff like that.

So, we’ll go right here to create a iSCSI virtual disk and you’ll see that the C drive is currently showing up, but nothing else. That’s because we haven’t created any volumes. So, we’ll go back over here and look at our volumes. And currently we just have the C drive. Let’s click on disk. All right. And let’s scroll down a little bit. And it’s kind of trying to catch up here. My computer is sort of struggling here because of the. Just so much going on. But I should be able to right click on this and click new volumes or new volume next. All right. And so from there. Okay. It looks like it’s still hanging on. I’m still missing some stuff here. Let’s go back over here to. And you know what? It’s close out of this. It might just need a refresh. I found that refreshing it inside the Server Manager tool does not always work very well. Got to wait on this little blue bar to quit spinning around here. By the way, if you get any of these little red warning messages, don’t worry about those right now. We’re going to click on file and storage services. Still waiting on the blue bar to quit spinning here. All right. So, let’s go back over to disk here. Okay, So, both of our disks are showing up correctly now. So, I should be able to right click on this first one and click new volume. We’ll click Next. All right. Next, I’m going to bring it online, set it to 50 gigs. We’ll just give it drive letter E. That’s fine. NTFS. That’s fine. Click Create. All right. So, it’s now going to go ahead and create the volume. All right. Close out of that. We’re going to do the same thing. This other disk here, the one that was disk2, 127. Click Okay. We’ll just go ahead and do the 427 gigs. All right. So, it’s now creating the volume.

So, now we’ve got two different disks, two volumes. All right. Of course, once you set the cluster up, this will make a little bit more sense. But I’m going to go over to iSCSI. And now I should be able to click on create an iSCSI virtual disk. And you can see that these two disks are showing up. So, I’ll go here to the E drive. And I’m just going to call this V disk one. And we’re going to dynamically expanding. We’ll just do 45 gigs of data for dynamically expanding. Obviously in the real world, you could do a lot more than this, right? All right. And then it says, Our target name. Specify a target name. This is NY-SVR1. And then who do you want your initiators to be? So the target is going to be the server that’s hosting the disks. In this case, NYC-SVR1 is hosting the disks, and then the initiators are servers that are going to connect to the disk.

Now, oddly enough, even though NYC-SVR1 is a target, it’s also initiator. It’s connecting to his own disk. And then we’re going to have NYC-DC1 also an initiator. That means it’s going to be connecting to the disk. That’s what an initiator is. So, we’re going to add, we’re going to click browse right here. We’re going to put in NYC-DC1. And that’s going to be our first initiator. We’ll click Okay on that. And as long as the service is running on that machine should be able to communicate with it. And it did create this link here. It specifies that it was able to see it.

Now, we’re going to go ahead and add NYC-SVR1 as well. Because remember, even though it’s the target, which is what’s hosting the server, the initiators are the ones connecting to it. It’s going to connect to it. So, we’ll click Okay to that. Now, it’s just going through that process. Same process as before. And they’re both at it. So, we’ll click Next. We’re not going to use any kind of encryption. You could use what’s called a challenge handshake authentication, protocol encryption to encrypt it all. But I’m not going to do that right now. I’m just going to click Create. And this is now creating the ESXi virtual disk information. Okay. So, there you have it.

Now, we have to do the initiator side, meaning we have to act as the server that’s connecting to the drive now that we’ve given permission for it to connect to the drive. So, I’m going to go Tools iSCSI initiator. Click yes to start the service. All right. It’s going to pop a little box up here and we’re going to connect to NYC-SVR1 because it’s the target. And it detected that there is a connection there that’s approved. Right. So, we’ll click Done and then we’ll click Okay. So, that’s fine.

Now, we’re going to jump over to our… Oh, and by the way, from there we should even be able to right click here and go to disk management. And once this minute comes, management comes up. We should be able to see that there is a new disk3. There it is. Disk3. It’s 45 gigs. So, that’s good. And then we’re going to jump over to the other machine. So, we’re going to jump over to RDC. As you can see, it’s done installing the iSCSI service and all that, but we’re going to go Tools. We don’t have to do the target stuff on this side because the DC1 is not the target. It’s just an initiator. It’s connecting to that disk. So, we’ll go down here tools and then go to iSCSI Initiator. Start the service. And we’re going to point to n y c Server1. We’re going to click Quick Connect. And it detected the connection is there and approved. We’ll click Okay. And at that point we should be able to do the same thing over here in disk management. And we should be able to see that it is officially connected and it is.

So, there is disk1. All right. It says this one unknown 4045 gigabytes. I can bring that online if I want, and then I’ll jump over to this other server. Server1. I forgot to bring it online a second ago. We’ll just bring that online. So, that the server recognizes it. They brought online for the server. Still haven’t put any kind of volume or anything on there. But what I want to do. Let’s go back over here. Guys, we have one virtual disk. From there, we’re going to go task. We’re going to say new ESXi virtual disk and then from there we have that 127 gig one. So, we’re going to click Next on that. I’m going to call this V disk to click Next. All right. We’ll just do let’s just do 100 gigs on that. Dynamically expanding 100 gigs. All right. Says Assign the ESXi virtual disk to an existing iSCSI target. We’re just going to go with the existing one, which is the same server. Click Create. All right, so that’s done.

Now, we’ll do the initiator part. If you just to kind of show you what will happen. Here we go. Here we’ll say NYC-SVR1 quick connect. It’s not there right now. Why isn’t it there? Because it’s already connected, that’s why. All right. So, it’s already there.

So, let’s go into computer management. I meant to click disk management. Here’s disk management right here. And there’s that other disk. Right. So, bring that online. It won’t initialize it. We can. There it is.

Now, let’s jump over to DC1. All right. And let me just go up here and click Rescan disk here. And look what shows up. That 100 gig disk is there. All right. All right.

So, that is the setup for the storage side of getting. If I’m going to use clustering, I need a storage area network base type disk such as an iSCSI disk. In the real world, you could use Fibre Channel and all that, but not getting into all that right here. But that is the initial setup for all this.