I was hoping someone here could give me some insight on my problem. I have
looked everywhere I know and can't find anything helpful. Let me begin by
telling you what I want to do. I have Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed on a
machine in our lab. I have 2 VMs set up on that machine. Both are installed
with Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The C:\ drive of each is an 8 Gig Fixed
Size virtual IDE drive. I have a shared SCSI bus from which I realize I will
have to provide the Quorum drive. My problem is this…I also want to provide
shared storage between the VMs for a shared Exchange Mailbox drive and a
shared Exchange Log drive.



I have tried to accomplish this in two ways and have failed both times.
Firstly, when I tried to set up .vhd files for each drive I wanted (MB, Log,
and Quorum) and share those using SCSI IDs. This did not work because I
could not start both VMs at the same time. When I had my first node running
and tried to start the second node, I got an error message about node 2 not
being able to start because one of its hard drives was already in use by
another node.



So I decided to set up one .vhd file and partition it three ways to handle
my needs. This didn’t work because when I got to the part where I need to
assign a Quorum drive in Cluster Administrator, it only gave me the option of
selecting Drive D:,E:,Q:. In other words, I was selecting the “physical�
drive rather than the partition.



My question is, can I even accomplish what I am trying? Is it possible to
have each VM with a C: drive and a shared D: and E: drive and also a shared
Quorum drive. If it is, how do I do it?



If you have any insights, that would be wonderful or if you know of a site
that explains what I need, please point me to it. I was following the
instructions on Microsoft’s site, (How to set up a Virtual two-node
cluster.), but it did not seem to do the trick. It did not address my hard
drive issue.



I truly appreciate any help you can give me on this issue.

In setting up my 2K3 Cluster using Virtual Server I found that Microsoft has
a limitation with the number of shared drives you are able to use. I cut and
paste the following from a document I created:

"There are limitations building your cluster using Virtual Server 2005.
Virtual Server only supports having one virtual hard disk on each SCSI
adapter that has been shared for clustering purposes. Also, since Virtual
Server only allows you to have two SCSI adapters that means you are limited
to two drives for your cluster."

I hope this was helpful.

I'm pretty sure that you can have four shared scsi adapters and four shared
drives in VS2005 R2.

But still limited to one shared drive per shared scsi adapter.

You can have a maximum of four shared storage drives (of which one must be
the quorum). Each drive must be attached to it's own shared SCSI bus
(important!: assign node 1 SCSI ID7, and node 2 ID 6). You must then use IDE
for each nodes' local system drive(s).


"kj" wrote:
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Try these:

http://www.roudybob.net/?p=118
http://roudybob.net/articles/935.aspx

"pdockery" <pdockery> wrote in message
news:b77a
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