Here's the setup:
The SAN
A Windows 2003 SP2 (x86) box
- It's a PDC
It runs StarWind 4.0 (the 15-day trial)
It has a 1TB RAID1 (2 of these in mirror)
It has a 1Gb NIC dedicated to iSCSI
A Windows 2008 R2 (x64) box
- It's node 1 of 2
It runs the StarWind VSS Support Module
It has a 1Gb NIC dedicated to iSCSI
- It's node 2 of 2, and it's hardware & software are identical to node 1
The implementation
The Quorum drive is a 150MB .img (not an .ibv). It seems to be working just fine, all the time.
There are 4, Highly-Available VMs:
- VM1
VM2
VM3
VM4
- VM1_OS.ibv
VM1_CFG.ibv
VM2_OS.ibv
VM2_CFG.ibv
(etc.)
VMs maintain reliability for no more than ~24 hours. This is just a sandbox environment, so I've created & destroyed a lot of LUNs and VMs over the past week. Sometimes, I can't even install the OS onto a pass through LUN at all (from within the VM, the Windows installer claims the disk can't be installed to: but if I "start over" and recreate the LUN, it will suddenly work). Of the VMs which have an OS and are running OK, eventually I will encounter a problem along the lines of:
- When migrating a running VM (either via move, or live migration) the destination node might see the configuration LUN (e.g., VM2_CFG.ibv) as "not formatted", which is erroneous.
When restarting a VM, sometimes the VM is unable to boot from it's primary hard disk - or, it blue-screens loading Windows, etc. It's OS disk simply becomes "corrupt", as far as I can tell.
In a VM that had Active Directory installed, 24 hours after installing AD that VM was be unable to load AD due to an "unspecified error".
Checkdisk runs frequently when booting VMs, and seems to repair quite a lot of stuff from time to time.
When altering the BIOS configuration for a VM, the result can be a corrupted / destroyed BCD, of course rendering the VM unable to load it's OS
The cluster nodes themselves appear to be running well. The cluster itself is healthy, and I have never had a problem with the Quorum drive becoming unavailable, which is just another iSCSI target volume - but, it is an .img, not an .ibv.
It seems to be true that, whenever I try to use an .ibv to either store configurations for VMs, or, use an .ibv as a pass through disk for a VM, the odds of corruption over time are effectively 100%.
Has anyone had success using StarWind to operate long-running, highly-available VMs in a 2008 R2 environment with a StarWind configuration similar to this?