So last night I was building a SQL Server 2008 failover cluster in a virtual environment with Windows Server 2008 on the free version of VMware Server. When building clusters on VMware, I typically add the following additional items on both virtual guest machines; a virtual SCSI bus, virtual hard disks and then mark disk locking to false. This usually does the trick and you can simulate a shared storage system between the two virtual servers, and then configure failover clustering.
Unfortunately, when I tried to configure failover clustering with Windows Server 2008, the initial clustering verification test and installation failed indicating that Windows Server 2008 could not find a shared storage device on the two nodes of the cluster and the disk bus type does not support clustering. After conducting research and tapping a few resources I found out that support for parallel-SCSI as a shared bus type has been dropped for Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the next evolution of parallel-SCSI and will be replacing it as a simple low cost cluster solution.Since the traditional method of creating a MS failover cluster would not suffice; I required an alternative. I used a 3rd party solution called RocketDivision(Starwind) to simulate the creation of iSCSI disk targets on my network, then I used the iSCSI Software Initiator in Windows Server 2008 to connect to the external shared storage and voilà I could successfully configure a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster using VMware.
For step-by-step instructions on installing a SQL Server 2008 single instance or multiple instance failover cluster on Windows Server 2008 reference – Chapter 12 “Implementing and Managing Failover Clustering” on SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration. The chapter also includes step-by-step instruction on how to design and implement a cluster from a Windows Server 2008 perspective also.
Both SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 are still in Beta, however, are scheduled for production release in the first quarter of 2008. The Rocket Division iSCSI product can be found at https://www.rocketdivision.com/download_starwind.html
