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I'm new to failover clustering and looking for verification that my oversimplified steps below are appropriate as a starting point. I have two Dell R430s (Windows Server 2012 R2 Enterprise) that will serve as Node0 and Node1. The SAN is a Dell MD3420.

  1. For the private heartbeat network I'll use a short crossover cable to directly connect NIC0 to NIC0 on the two nodes.
  2. I'll Connect NIC1 on each respective node to my switch(es.) In reality I'll use LACP to team a couple NICs on each node.
  3. Using the Dell SAN Management tool I'll create two logical volumes - one at 1024 mb for the quorum and one much larger volume for shared storage for my VMs.
  4. I'll add the shared volumes to each node - not sure exactly how to do this but will review the Dell whitepaper as I go through the steps.
  5. Add the Failover Clustering role to each node. Run verification tool on one.
  6. Add the Hyper-V role within the Failover Cluster Management tool on one of my nodes.
  7. Test and once everything looks good, migrate my existing VMs from four standalone servers with local storage to either of my two nodes.

I want to use the nodes in an active configuration. In other words, I want to utilize both nodes equally which ensuring a VM from either node will fail over to the other node if there's a problem.

Again, I know this is a massive oversimplification but am I missing any "major" steps in the process? Thanks very much for reading.

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    The procedure sounds quite straightforward. Maybe this step-by-step guide will provide you some more information about the necessary steps. starwindsoftware.com/…. Just disregard the storage part.
    – Net Runner
    Apr 11, 2017 at 9:53

1 Answer 1

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Those steps are roughly correct. I suggest creating a small test volume in addition to the quorum and data volumes you have. That way you can run cluster validation while the cluster is running, and perform the storage failover tests on that volumne.

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