Hyper-V 2 node Hyperconverged: Clustered VM's and replications

Anders Mogensen · Sat Jun 15, 2024 4:49 pm

If I choose to run my 2 servers in a 2 node hyperconverged setup (for running Cluster), I am not able to replicate my Hyper-V VM's to the other Host. As I understand it is this way by design, but what are others doing to be able to replicate the VM's (and use Additional Recovery Points), or doing instead?

Sat Jun 15, 2024 9:01 pm

For a Hyper-V cluster, to make storage work as expected, you need to create a Failover Cluster and present the StarWind disks as Cluster Shared volumes.
Unlike file-level protocols used in NAS, iSCSI is a block-level protocol and it cannot arbiter read-write access to an iSCSI device connected to multiple servers. In order to provide access to one device from multiple servers, the device needs to have a clustered file system. While VMFS is a clustered file system and no additional actions should be done to see updated data on the datastore, iSCSI storage, connected to the nodes in a Microsoft failover cluster should be managed by the cluster and formatted as CSVFS if used as Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). Such an approach allows to sharing single storage device between the nodes in the cluster and getting updated data on them.
Do not put the DCs that serve the cluster on the cluster storage presented to the cluster they serve. If DCs that serve the cluster fail or do not start after the power outage, you won't be able to start the cluster that easily. In other words, you get the situation where cluster does not start because of the DCs not starting and DCs not starting because the cluster i snot running.
See more at https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... san-usage/
I hope I got the problem right. Otherwise, can you rephrase it?

Anders Mogensen · Mon Jun 17, 2024 6:51 am

Hi yaroslav
For test/evaluation purpose, I have installed Starwind VSAN on 2 new servers. Then I installed the cluster service and started deploying som test VM's. Everything runs ok (I think

, but then I would setup replication on a VM. This is when I started getting some questions, because before I installed the cluster service, I could replicate the VM's between the 2 hosts. When I'm trying to do that now, I get an error message that the specified Replica server is a node in a failover cluster. So if I understand that correct, the 2 hosts is not able to act as "standalone replica servers" anymore? In our production setup, we have setup replication with additional recovery points and VSS snapshots, but I guess this is not possible in a Hyperconverged setup?

Mon Jun 17, 2024 8:22 am

I think these are more Microsoft-related questions than StarWind.
You do not need to replicate the VMs between the nodes as they share the same storage, and are in the same cluster.
If the setup is licensed under the trial key, you are welcome to book a solution overview and walkthrough with one of our techs. Please reach out to support@starwind.com use this thread and 1173866 as your references.