DPM 2010 and Hyper-V R2 Clustering

[Moredhel]

Hi guys,

We've just upgraded to DPM 2010 and a new LTO5 drive (Which is awesome, no more juggling space on the tapes!) and we've decided to try and backup some of our virtual machines as well as the data on them.

We have a 6 node Hyper-V R2 Cluster using Clustered Shared Volumes, DPM 2010 is cluster aware and shows up all the virtual machines perfectly, we're about to do a test VM backup and it all seems like it's going to be fine, however, we do have one question we can't seem to find the answer to:

How do we back up the cluster configuration itself? There doesn't appear to be an option for it. We're assuming at the minute that backing up the system state on each node will do the job, but we'd like some reassurance that this is the case. The documentation on it is decidedly lacking!

Any help would be grand.

 

[Moredhel]

it's Hyper-V 2.

I found clustering it to be very simple. You just attach the SAN storage to each node, attach the volumes you want to use for Clustered Shared Volumes and the quorum, then take them offline. Make sure the Hyper-V role is installed and you have your virtual networks setup identically accross all the nodes, then go into Failover Cluster Manager and create the cluster, the wizard does all the work for you (Creating the Clustered Shared Volumes, selecting the quorum disk, setting up the clustered networks etc).

After you've done that you can make VMs "highly available" which allows for things like live migration between nodes and the like. Essentially the Virtual Machines are cluster aware while the hyper-v role itself isn't. If a node goes down, the Virtual machine will move itself to another node.

It also means you can have virtual machines on a node which aren't highly available if you want to, although I'm not sure why you would do that, unless you wanted it to run from local disks on one of the nodes or something, or had a special network configuration that used a NIC specific to that node. Stuff like that.

We use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy VMs and manage the cluster, the interface is pretty similar to VMWare V-Sphere, the terminology for things is slightly different, but it's pretty much the same.

I do find deploying VMs to be nicer with Virtual Machine Manager though, as it can do more stuff than V-Sphere without having to resort to obscure answer files.