Installing SQL Failover Clustering Without SAN Storage – Windows 2008 R2

It always been hard to test out the failover clustering as it requires SAN Storage device to be connected and requires many servers for testing.

This morning I have seen an interesting article in the community the Microsoft has released “Microsoft iScsi Software Target” free of charge, by using the utility you can create a storage and share it across multiple servers, “fooling” the windows to think that a SAN Storage is available.

Following the above, I been able to install failover clustering for testing over one single machine without any other equipments! I used Hyper-V to create 3 Windows 2008 R2 Servers and 1 Virtual Hard Disk Drive and worked out a fully functioning test environment, below what you need if you like to test this one your machine:

1. Over a test server, install Windows 2008 R2 and activate the Hyper-V.

2.  Create 3 virtual machines, one for SQL Server Node1, and the second for the second failover node, and the third one to act as storage server.

3. Create 1 virtual hard disk to represent your SAN Storage.

When you gather these, click on the following tech-net article that details all what you need:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mghazai/archive/2009/12/12/hyper-v-guest-clustering-step-by-step-guide.aspx

Hope that this helps.

Regards,

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Mohammad R. Daoud MVP - MCT
MCP, MCBMSP, MCTS, MCBMSS
+962 - 79 - 999 65 85
me@mohdaoud.com
http://www.di.jo