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I have 2 servers with Hyper-V 2016 hosts and a MSA 2040 storage, both are connected via iSCSI. Hosts are running on thight internal storage. I need to store all my VMs into the MSA, but if I understand it right I cant use the storage simultaneously. Im trying to set up a replication solution with a shared storage.

Are there some other way how to make that storage shared and multi-usable besides clustering it in Windows Server or VMware environments? As far as Im concerned VMware takes the given volume, formats it and make it usable for every host. Is there a way how Microsoft does it?

Jon
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With regards to your setup, in order to implement shared storage for Hyper-V Cluster it would be enough to setup on both servers:

  • the latest Windows updates
  • Failover Cluster feature
  • MPIO feature
  • Hyper-V role.

Having installed Windows Server with its updates:

  1. Enable iSCSI support at MPIO settings.
  2. Configure iSCSI connections to MSA 2040 storage.
  3. Create Failover Cluster
  4. Add MSA 2040 storage as Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).
  5. Create Hyper-V VM hosted on ClusterVolume (which would be CSV)
  6. Configure Hyper-V Failover and Live Migration

More about the implementation you can read in HPE MSA 2040 guide

You should note, a single storage array is kind of a single point of failure and it would be beneficial in terms of redundancy and availability to add one more array or go hyperconverged with software-defined shared storage solutions like HPE StoreVirtual VSA, StarWind Virtual SAN or Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

Mr. Raspberry
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    I'd rather avoid Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) on anything below 4 nodes because of the resiliency issues: two-node S2D cluster can't survive double disk or single disk failure if one node is down for planned maintenance or whatever other reason. Three-node S2D works fine but with 3-way replication only which is kind of expensive... – BaronSamedi1958 Aug 29 '17 at 16:42
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You need to use the clustering to have the feature you want.

vmware/xenserver manage it without cost, but like in vmware if you want vmotion it imply cost too.

A High Availability Cluster is a group of 2 or more bare metal servers which are used to host virtual machines. The server nodes (physical machines) work together to provide redundancy and failover to your virtual machines with little to no downtime on the VMs.

yagmoth555
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    Thank you for the reply. I did VMware before, now my task was to see, what failover solutions provides Hyper-V 2016 host itself. The idea of having a fileshare which is hosted on one of the servers is quite bad, but in this case - whatever keeps me going fits. – Jon Aug 22 '17 at 11:31
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Found a way how to use the disk on multiple devices. One one of the hosts I installed Windows Server and made a fileshare in the MSA device.

Jon
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    The better solution would be to set up a Hyper-V Failover Cluster with the two hosts and use Cluster Shared Volumes for the iSCSI disk. – joeqwerty Aug 22 '17 at 11:19
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    Using a shared folder from the mount server creates two single point of failures - if the share server dies so does the share. Failover clustering allows you to access the share from either host independent of each other (and it's faster ;-). – Zac67 Aug 28 '17 at 17:35
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    Im confused - I have 2 phisical servers and one MSA, the topology itself is a point of failure, but not on that. I tried before using clustering, when both servers are cluster nodes and MSA is the storage, if im correct only one node could connect and use the storage due iSCSI, but I need both nodes to access the storage in realtime. I need to provide MSA as local storage for both servers. – Jon Aug 29 '17 at 08:29
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    Tried to cluster all together, the storage is presented to all cluster nodes via C:\ClusteredStorage, but having different error - New virtual machine Failed to Realize. I guess something isnt right with the network, because I coulnt make new VMs on shared storage before. Just returned failed to create a VM. – Jon Aug 29 '17 at 11:02
  • @joeqwerty Yea it defitinely is, I just didn't know how to do that back in the day – Jon Jul 24 '18 at 13:48