clustering vmware workstation

darlings · Mon Nov 21, 2005 2:45 pm

did anyone succeed in getting clustering running on vmware workstation?

I've tried to set setup a test environment using windows2003 on vmware 5.0 using starwind2.6.4
the two servers are in a domain, the two servers can see the shared image file but when initialising the cluster i keep getting the message that the quorum disk cannot be located.

any suggestions will be appreciated

Val (staff) · Mon Nov 21, 2005 4:11 pm

Which type of StarWind's target device have you selected when creating the quorum disk?
ImageFiles should work well as quorum disks. Just not to forget set 'Clustering' checkbox for the device.

If the issue is related to some MS Clustering settings, it's worth asking questions in microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering newsgroup too.

darlings · Mon Nov 21, 2005 9:06 pm

I'm a newbee concerning clustering,

could you explain how to select the target device when creating a quorum disk?

Val (staff) · Mon Nov 21, 2005 9:50 pm

1) You need mount the disk on both systems.
2) When an iSCSI disk has been mounted, it is visible in the system as any other local hard drive.
So you need to look at the MSDN or google a bit to find more details on setting up MS clusters.

darlings · Mon Nov 21, 2005 10:34 pm

the disks are mounted already on both systems
it is visible as local harddrive alreadyon both systems

what is strange is that the size is not equal on both systems

I'll have a look at technet/msdn.

Val (staff) · Mon Nov 21, 2005 11:05 pm

darlings wrote:the disks are mounted already on both systems
it is visible as local harddrive alreadyon both systems

what is strange is that the size is not equal on both systems

I'll have a look at technet/msdn.

Are you sure both machines mounted the same iSCSI target disk?
The disk should look the same from any initiator...

n00dles · Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:20 am

You don't need anything more than what comes with vmware workstation to do clustering. All you have to do is make sure that your OS disks are IDE, and your quorum disk is SCSI, then add a few lines to each vm's config file. Here's a shamelessly self promoting link on how it is done:

http://n00dlestheindelible.blogspot.com ... re-5x.html

Val (staff) · Sat Mar 18, 2006 9:12 am

The idea is to emulate a real iSCSI cluster using a Vmware environment, not just to set up a cluster with the Vmware's means.

Many people reported that iSCSI clustering works well with StarWind iSCSI server keeping Quorum disks and other cluster resources. This was proved for real networked clusters, Vmware environment and MS Virtual Server/PC enviroments...

So the problem reported by the OP was related to the cluster configuration. I hope he managed to solve it at that time...