Hvper-v host - NIC setup and best practice
Am looking for some recommendations and best practice advice for setting up 2 hyper-v hosts.
Both hosts are different spec:
Both hosts are dissimilar hardware and there is no shared storage. They have 4 NIC cards each.
Given the hardware limitations, I have been told that clustering the hosts will not be possible. Therefore I have teamed 2 NICs on each for management and 2 NICS on each for VM traffic which are bound to a virtual switch. This uses all of the available NIC cards on each hosts.
I have read that it is recommended to have 1 NIC dedicated for live migrations. Live migrations is an option I would like to have. (I would ideally like some sort of fail-over configuration too however I've been told this isn't possible)
Given the scenario above, Do you think that the configuration is optimal? Alternatively, what best practice advice would you suggest be for setting up the NICS on each host?
thank you for reading.
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You have set things up as we would: 2 Ports for Management and 2 Ports for vSwitch exclusive of the host OS.
Shared Nothing Live Migration would be helpful for moving VMs and storage between the two hosts. However, on a Gigabit only network one should not bother with a dedicated LM network since the action would be infrequent at best. Beware of licensing obligations as well.
Our hosts would have a RAID 6 array with two logical disks: 90GB for host OS and the balance to the Hyper-V settings files and VHDX files.
In a two host scenario we would join both hosts to the domain all the while running a DC on each. DHCP Failover would be configured between the two DCs along with ADDS, DNS, and Group Policy structures replication.
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Server 2012 actually has a feature called Shared Nothing Live Migration which will allow you to live migrate VMs in a non-failover cluster environment to another 2012 Hyper-V host. See this article for the steps required to set this up: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/jj134199.aspx
Step 2 in the article contains steps to specify a dedicated network you want to use for live migrations.
You won't be able to have them failover unfortunately though, not without a failover cluster with your VMs on shared storage (such as a SAN). You will have to settle with the above.