Windows 2008 R2 RC Failover Clustering and Hyper-V

[TheInstaller]

I decided to try Windows 2008 R2 with Failover clustering and Hyper-V. On "paper" everything looks very promissing.

In reality a had problems with slow disk performance.

The servers i used for this are 2 IBM xSeries 3550, with 16GB of RAM memory, 2 CPU Xeon 5110 and QLogic FC adapters QLE2460 that are connected to IBM storage 4800 with 15k rpm disks.

 

I have virtualized 2 XenApp servers with approximatelly 50 users and I have about 12 published applications on both servers in a farm.

 

I've created Clustered Shared Volume. Live migration is working but not quite as I expected. While the VM is migrating from one node in a cluster to another there is downtime (no ping) for about 4-5 minutes. This also happens with VM that has no services installed and is under no load at all, just basic installation of Windows.

 

I found out that disk performance of Clusterd Shared Volume is very slow. I used program called HD Speed for testing. The reading performance is anywhere between 0 an 12MB per second, most of the time 0MB/s. I've also tested some other server connected to the same storage (IBM 4800) and servers connected to IBM 4700 with SATA drives at 7200rpm. The performance of LUN's onother servers varies from 80MB/s to 300MB/s, depends which disk I'm testing on storage. Example, on one disk read transfer is 79-83 MB/s, on another 298-300MB/s, yet another disk about 150MB/s etc...

 

I evicted one node from Windows 2008 R2 cluster and the storage performance is like it should be. Read transfer rate is between 128MB/s and 131MB/s.

 

Does anyone has any problems like this? Is there any "hidden" options I have missed? I didn't found anywhere on the internet someone talking about this. I talked to some Microsoft guys but they never heard anything similar.

 

I found this about Clustered Shared Volume:

"Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) feature in R2 is going to be a disappointment to many. It is nothing more than NTFS with a few filter/wrapper drivers, so it is not going to win any awards."

This is the where someone talks about virtualization:

http://toutvirtual.com/blogs/index.php?tag=clustered-shared-volumes-(csv)

 

Thanks