Virtual SAN HA on Windows 2008

jpal · Thu May 28, 2015 1:27 am

Hello,

I have 2 Windows 2008 R2 machines that i plan to use for HA or Cluster. I installed a single node on one and it works perfectly fine with it but i wonder if it will work with HA on both.

What type of license should i use if i keep both at windows 2008 using compute and storage separated model?

Thanks,

Thu May 28, 2015 11:24 am

You need another key for HA setup. Please refer to the document below it indicates the path for obtaining one.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/styles ... s_Paid.pdf

We do consider bare metal setups as 100% production so you'll need commercial license.

P.S. It's recommended to upgrade to 2012 R2...

jpal wrote:Hello,

I have 2 Windows 2008 R2 machines that i plan to use for HA or Cluster. I installed a single node on one and it works perfectly fine with it but i wonder if it will work with HA on both.

What type of license should i use if i keep both at windows 2008 using compute and storage separated model?

Thanks,

jpal · Fri May 29, 2015 6:18 pm

thanks, i am thinking about that but i might end up buying new servers with windows 2012 instead. I would like these 2008 R2's to work though applying the 2 node license provided to me keeps giving an error of invalid platform and the other one invalid license file.

Sat May 30, 2015 9:15 pm

That's becasue you're trying to:

1) Use single-node key on both hosts to build HA setup. Would not work as 1-node setup cannot be used for HA.

2) Trying to use 2-node setup in "compute and storage separated" scenario (storage and hypervisor are physically segregated from each other). Would not work as 2-node
setup is intended to cover "Hyper-Converged" setup only.

jpal wrote:thanks, i am thinking about that but i might end up buying new servers with windows 2012 instead. I would like these 2008 R2's to work though applying the 2 node license provided to me keeps giving an error of invalid platform and the other one invalid license file.

jpal · Sun May 31, 2015 3:36 pm

ok, so how do i achieve the "compute and storage separated" scenario with HA setup with the servers i have? Hopefully i can get windows 2012 and have it ready this coming week.

Thanks again...

Sun May 31, 2015 4:47 pm

This is a commercial deployment and you cannot do it with a free version. One of the reasons why it's a bad idea to use free version as "evergreen" trial.

Download trial and proceed. 2008 R2 is still on the HCL.

jpal wrote:ok, so how do i achieve the "compute and storage separated" scenario with HA setup with the servers i have? Hopefully i can get windows 2012 and have it ready this coming week.

Thanks again...

jpal · Mon Jun 01, 2015 4:31 pm

thanks for clearing this up...

Mon Jun 01, 2015 6:21 pm

Uber-cool "Free Vs Paid" here:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/styles ... s_Paid.pdf

The best way for you to go would be virtualizing these two for now "storage only hosts" and move from 2+2 to 4 hypervisor nodes with only two keeping storage.
Benefits: more CPU and RAM to your VMs. Eventually you'll get something like on the picture below:

jpal wrote:thanks for clearing this up...

jpal · Mon Jun 01, 2015 7:22 pm

i already know about that... i only wanted to see if it will work in our environment before proceeding. but thanks anyway...

Tue Jun 02, 2015 9:47 am

Hello Jpal!

Please let me know if you have any questions left, thank you.