Microsoft Cluster Quorum Dynamic Disk Vs Basic
Learn about the options available for quorum in Microsoft Failover Clustering. This article shows how and why to configure the related options. Quorum in Microsoft Failover Clusters. 2012 R2 brought about almost as many improvements as the original introduction of dynamic quorum. The witness disk is now assigned a dynamic. The reason I;m doing this test is because currently we are already using a 2-Node File Server Cluster with Q: (Quorum), R: data S: data disks as MBR and because of the MBR basic disk limitation we want to add a new disk T: as GPT but it seems I cannot.
Weird one. Well, weird to me.
I have a 2 node MS cluster. Tried both 2008 R2 and now 2012.
ESX 5.1 on 2 hosts, 5 others still on 4.1. 4.1 hosts are out of scope for now (pretty sure!).
2 individual Windows Cluster nodes, VM-A on Host-A, VM-B on Host-B, both 5.1. OS drives are each hosted on separate VMFS5 Thick provisioned drives. RDM's are set for physical, I have 2 presented and attached.
SAN is Oracle Openstorage 7320 2-node storage cluster, ALUA type. Each node has a pool of storage it hosts off as optimized/primary owner. All paths show correctly in vCenter.
Primary reason for using RDM is that I need a file partition of 4TB in size for use in a medium-sized pool for roaming profiles in a Citrix implementation. Prefer not to get crazy with DFS and different volumes, because of high intra-breeding (ha!) of people across departments, locations and functions. Very challenging to try to find a logical structure that sticks for too long, so rather go for 1 large store.
2 RDM's presented to all hosts. Device attachment has perennially-attached flag set to true.
VM-A does raw mapping of 2GB LUN meant for quorum. Device attaches just fine, set to Physical and Physical SCSI Bus Sharing done, set for 1:0. Next VM-A does RDM to the 4TB LUN, same deal, set for 2:0. Each map file stored with VM (I've tried placing in an 'RDM Mapping LUN' which didn't work - problem described below).
Go over to VM-B and map to existing drives, physical, physical, 1:0... yadda yadda.
Turn on VM-A. Drives seen, great. Turn on server VM-B. Drives there. Great.
Create cluster. Run tests, passes everything 100%. Set up the cluster, all seems well.
Then I reboot a node. Drives fail over and that goes well. Then I notice they bump to offline, then quorum (the 2GB LUN) comes back online, 4TB LUN goes to Failed. Manually restarting works every time.
So I thought maybe it was a failover thing. All resources owned by VM-B, I reboot VM-A. Drives all get bumped offline. Quorum drive tends to come back almost immediately. 4TB fails quick, but never comes back. If I shut down instead of reboot, same behavior. Once VM-A is powered off, I can manually start any disk which failed and it'll run forever. If I turn VM-A back on while everything running on VM-B, drives fail during POST of VM-A almost immediately. Again, I have to manually bring online.
On Windows 2012, I've tried using Scale Out File Sharing - thinking maybe I just need to get both head reading/writing at the same time to maintain some kind of connection. Works great, by the way - but still fails in the same way. 2008 R2, same thing in exact same ways.
Have I missed something obvious here?
Windows 7 Dynamic Disk Vs Basic Disk
We aren't talking about a SCSI time out setting here. This isn't a time out, it's almost like a lock conflict happens and the last one in immediately loses. Timeout values are set to 60, but this is not a timeout. As soon as I shut down, or turn on, a VM, the other guy flips out almost immediately.
Dynamic Disk Pros And Cons
I've had no issues at all with storage with any of these hosts on this SAN setup, pretty damn fast, too. I can sling data and LUNs around and everything sees and connects to whatever I have, where ever I put it, never an issue with pathing, ownership, zoning, etc.
Failover Cluster Move Quorum Disk
Anyone ever see anything like this?