Leveraging Clustered Shared Volumes in Windows 2008 R2

While Server 2008 R2 and System Center have ushered in what we would call a new age of manageability, the R2 release is poised to continue that trend and polish up a few of those features. One thing to note is a more universally interoperable approach to server management and the Server components that typically work in parallel. Gone are the days of error messages (detailed or otherwise) that only offer information. Alongside dependency reports, you are liable to find a simple button that in essence acts on backfilling those dependencies. Some of these newer features may be trivial but advance the notion of logical management.

In a datacenter, each action taken represents a fraction of effort required. An update of a software component may take 4 minutes, but when considering the bigger picture that’s 4 minutes for every server in your datacenter. My point is that manageability/reusable work is essential. Cluster Shared Volumes delivers on that order.

Here at the MPSC, we manage a lot of virtual machines and physical hosts. We use SAN over fiber for storage and the Sun Sunfire 4450’s as high volume / small footprint Hyper-V hosts. This presents some challenges with respect to management over time as service delivery scales up. SCVMM 2008 curtails some of the headache but is agnostic in regards to storage and availability. CSV in Server 2008 R2 and the release of SCVMM 2008 R2 brings all of these issues into alignment.

Rather than managing tens or hundreds of LUN’s, this presents a LUN in a way that is mappable (with read/write) to more than one host and offers failover between them. Meaning one LUN to rule them all (if you so choose). In terms of virtual machines, not only does this make them highly available but also eliminates downtime due to host maintenance or other unforeseen failures. Add the self provisioning function of the Self Service Portal from SCVMM and we’re exposing an easily managed on-demand virtual machine environment. All I can say is someone has heard our prayers.