How do I setup my Cluster in a Box?

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Rob Waggoner

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I received a question around setting up a cluster for a Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) configuration similar to the device I talked about here.  The trick to configuring clustering is ensuring you have access to shared storage.  Clustering requires shared storage so that each compute node has visibility to the clustered resources.

In my configuration I have two compute nodes, each compute node has two 250GB HDs dedicated to it.  I mirrored the two 250GB HDs on each node and installed the Operating Systems on that mirrored volume.  Notice how I said Operating Systems (plural).  Since I use my CiB for test, I leverage boot to VHD to easily install multiple OS configurations for each node.  Most things can be accomplished in VMs, but every now and then I need to reconfigure the actual Hyper-V hosts since I leverage multiple domains.  Once you install the OS on each node, be sure to enable MPIO or each shared drive will show up twice since there are redundant paths to the storage.

image I’ve enabled support for iSCSI as well as SAS devices, but for shared SAS, you only need to enable support for SAS devices.  Once this is enabled, you will have to reboot your node.

Once you’ve enabled MPIO for all of your nodes, you can then use Storage Spaces to configure the shared storage.  We have a good article here that talks about how to configure a clustered storage space in Windows Server 2012.

Until next time,

Rob