Adding a Node To A VMM Managed Hyper-V Cluster

I’ve just gone through this process so I thought I’d document what I did:

  • Have a test VM ready and running on the cluster.  You’ll be moving it around to/from the new node. Don’t use a production machine in case something doesn’t work.
  • Built the new node.  Set up hardware, drivers and patches, making sure the machine was identical to the other nodes in the cluster.  I mean identical.
  • Enable Hyper-V role and Failover Clustering feature.
  • Configure the virtual networks to be identical as the other nodes – VMM won’t do this in the “add” step and we know it messes up the configuration of External networks.
  • Used the SAN manager to present all cluster disks to the new node.
  • Put the cluster, Hyper-V cluster nodes and VMM server into maintenance mode in OpsMgr.
  • Add the new node to the cluster in Failover Clustering.  Modified the cluster quorum settings to be recommended.
  • Refreshed the cluster in VMM 2008 R2.  Waited for the new node to appear under the cluster in a pending state.
  • Right-clicked on the new pending node and selected Add Node To Cluster.  Entered administrator credentials (good for all nodes in the cluster).  VMM ran a job to deploy the VMM agent.
  • If everything is good and matches up (watch out for virtual networks) then you won’t see the dreaded “Unsupported Cluster Configuration” error.
  • Move that test VM around from the new node to all the other nodes and back again using Live Migration.
  • Re-run the validation tests against your cluster ASAP.

All should be well at this point.  If so, deploy your OpsMgr agent and take the OpsMgr agents out of maintenance mode.

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