8 . Configure the virtual networks that will be available for all cluster nodes. Click
Next.
9 . On the Summary page, click Finish, and the cluster will be created. Once the
creation process is complete, the cluster will be shown in the Servers view of
SCVMM.Once the cluster is created, it can be fully managed with SCVMM, and you may want
to customize some attributes. Right-click the cluster, and select Properties. On the
General page of the properties is a cluster reserve value that by default is set to 1. This
defines the number of nodes in this cluster that you want to be tolerant of failure. For
example, a value of 1 means that you want the cluster to be able to tolerate the failure
of one node. This is used when deploying resources; SCVMM will ensure that the
cluster is not overutilized so that it can’t run all deployed virtual machines in the
event of a node failure. If you had a four-node cluster and had the reserve set to 1,
SCVMM would allow the deployment of only virtual machines that could be run on
three nodes. If this was a lab environment and you wanted to fill every node, then you
could set the cluster reserve to 0. Alternatively, in a larger cluster, such as a 64-node
cluster, you may want to increase the reserve value to 2 or 4 to support more nodes
being unavailable. This value is important not just for node failures but also for
maintenance, where a node is drained of all virtual machines so that it can be patched
and rebooted. This means that it’s important in a production environment always to
have the reserve set to at least 1 so that maintenance can be performed without having
to shut down virtual machines.
The other tabs of the cluster properties show information about the status, storage,
and networks. Figure 7.24 shows the view of the current shared volumes, giving easy
insight into the utilization.
Figure 7.24 Shared volumes