[Resolved] Virtual Server 2005 - SQL Test/Dev Cluster

[nmX.Memnoch]

I'm in the process of setting up VS2005 on a server (Dual Xeon 3.2GHz, 12GB RAM, etc, etc...plenty of horsepower). What I've done so far is created two virtual servers, installed 2003 R2 Enterprise on both and successfully clustered them using the MS guide(s). The plan is to use this for testing an upgrade of our live SQL cluster from SQL2000 to SQL2005, and later for development purposes. I talked them into going with VS for the testing/development setup because I can create "point-in-time" backups of the configurations and virtual drives, then restore them easily should they mess something up during testing or development.

The problem I am now faced with is that I can't get Virtual Server to allow any SCSI ID's beyond 0 for the shared drives. This means I can't add any shared drives for the SQL data/logs. Any suggestions as to what may be causing this? Here's some more information on the configuration:

Both servers have the boot drive on the virtual IDE channel as recommended.

Node 1 has a virtual SCSI controller configured in shared mode using ID 7.

Node 2 has a virtual SCSI controller configured in shared mode using ID 6.

The network connections have been configured as recommended.

All virtual hard drives are configured to be dynamic size, except for the quorum VHD which is configured for a fixed size of 500MB.

Edited February 9, 2007 by nmX.Memnoch

[nmX.Memnoch]

I've been doing some searching and it appears that I'll have to create a virtual SCSI adapter for each shared VHD that I need to add. Can someone confirm this?

If this is the case, then unfortunately I'll only be able to have four shared VHD's since VS2005 only lets you add a max of four virtual SCSI adapters.

[nmX.Memnoch]

I found the answer.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...I.mspx?mfr=true

However, each SCSI adapter can support only one virtual hard disk that has been shared for clustering purposes.

Fortunately I can make four drives work. The live cluster has the database data and log drives seperated for each database (two databases use four drive arrays). I can consolidate that in the testing/development environment and make four drives work (Quorum, MSDTC, two databases with data and logs on same VHD for each).

[cluberti]

Learn something new every day .