Saturday, October 08, 2005

Setting up a W2K3 cluster using Virtual Server 2005

I'm setting up demos for some presentations I'm doing for Exchange Connections in San Diego. One of these demostrations will include building a 2-node active/passive cluster. I have done this before using VMWare. There is a really good article called A VMWare Clustering Recipe by Chris Wolf that was helpful in getting this working. Unfortunately, I can't find my VMWare license keys and they have been less than forth-coming in getting me another one.

So, I figured I would use Virtual PC, since I use that frequently in the Exchange Server 2003 Course 2400 class. However, clustering is no supported using Virtual PC since it does not support shared drives (and naturally, both nodes of the cluster need to access the shared disks).
Even though I'm not crazy about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, I guess I'll give in and use it. I found a couple of great "how to" articles on doing this, but the best of the bunch is Setting Up A Windows Server 2003 Cluster in VS 2005 by Bob Roudebush. Thanks Bob! You have made one of my tasks this weekend somewhat easier.

If anyone from the Microsoft VS team is listening, I find the whole web interface to Virtual Server 2005 really klunky. I much prefer the VMWare or Virtual PC interfaces.

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