Aidan Finn, IT Pro

The great thing about a lab with lots of NICs is that you can configure in lots of ways.  Today I built out a new Windows Server 8 Hyper-V cluster, using SMB 2.2 as the storage for the VMs.  This is how I configured it:

You might notice that the configuration isn’t all that different from what you’re used to.  You still require certain communication channels.  How you create those channels can vary wildly in Windows Server 8.  In W2008/R2 you require physical NICs.  In the new version of Hyper-V you can do that, you can create that same effect with native NIC teams to aggregate bandwidth (as I did here), or you can create converged fabrics (as few as 2 physical NICs), or fabrics with isolation, and on and on.  But you still need 2 channels for the cluster, as you can see in the middle of my diagram.

I went a little nuts then.  I used my PowerShell script to create 76 VMs.  Off I went to a meeting, and they were waiting for me when I came back.  And then I did my first stress test of concurrent Live Migration.  You can see that I had a 20 GbE pipe made up of 2 * 10 GbE NICs in a NIC team.  It ran pretty quickly … 38 GB of VM RAM from Host1 to Host2.  I think I might try to script that Live Migration, and run it back and forth again and again to see what happens

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