Creating Clusters with SCVMM
SCVMM can also help with clustering your Hyper-V hosts (and with Windows Server
2012 R2 and above, your Scale-Out File Server clusters). SCVMM can be used to
deploy Hyper-V hosts initially as part of a cluster or to take existing Hyper-V hosts and
join them to a cluster. To use SCVMM to create and manage the cluster, it’s important
that SCVMM also fully manages the storage it uses. There are other requirements for
using SCVMM to create and manage clusters:
The cluster should meet the normal cluster requirements (part of Active Directory
domain, same OS, and configuration level) and pass validation.
The domain of the Hyper-V hosts must be trusted by the domain of the SCVMM
management server.
The Hyper-V hosts must be in the same host group in SCVMM.
Hyper-V hosts must be on the same IP subnet.Microsoft has detailed documentation on the requirements at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610630.aspx
The actual cluster creation is a wizard-driven process that validates the requirements
of the cluster, enables the failover cluster feature on the hosts if it’s not already
installed, ensures that all storage is correctly unmasked to the hosts (remember,
SCVMM must be managing the storage that is presented to the cluster and for
Windows Server 2016, it can also use Storage Spaces Direct), and makes each disk a
Cluster Shared Volume. Follow these steps to create a cluster:
1 . Open the SCVMM console, and open the Fabric workspace.
2 . Select Servers in the navigation pane.
3 . From the Home tab, select Create ➣ Hyper-V Cluster.
4 . Enter a name for the new cluster, and select the Run As account to use to perform
the configurations on each host. Click Next.
5 . On the Nodes page, add the nodes that will be part of the cluster by selecting the
servers and clicking the Add button. Then click Next.
6 . If any of the nodes are using static IP configuration, you will be prompted for the
IP configuration, which can be either an IP pool or a specific IP address to use.
Enter the IP configuration, and click Next.
7 . Storage that can be clustered (that is, storage that is available to all the nodes) will
be displayed. Select the storage to be used for the cluster, and then select the
classification, partition style, filesystem, format instructions, and whether to make
the disk a CSV. By default, a format is performed, so all data would be lost,
although you can select Do Not Format in the File System area. Click Next.