Windows 7 on vmware
The recommended and supported vSphere configuration options for a CAB deployment of a WSFC are shown in the table below: vSphere version We will concentrate on the clustered disk option provided by a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) and will discuss configurations involving VMware Virtual Volumes (VVol) in a separate blog post.
The CIB solution should not be used for any production implementations – if a single ESXi host will fail, all cluster nodes will be powered off and, as a result, an application will experience downtime. We do not recommend a configuration where all VMs hosting nodes of a cluster are placed on a single ESXi host (so called “cluster-in-a-box”, or CIB). CAB provides high availability (HA) both from the In-guest Operating System (OS) and vSphere environment perspective. The information provided is applicable to VMware vSphere versions 6.x and 7.x in configurations when the VMs hosting the nodes of a WSFC cluster are located on different ESXi hosts – known as “Cluster-across-box (CAB)” in VMware official documentation. Note: Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Group does not require clustered disks between VMs to host a database and therefor no special disk configurations on the vSphere side are needed. One of the application examples leveraging a WSFC with clustered disks is Microsoft SQL Server configured with Always On Failover Cluster Instance (FCI). In this blog post you will learn about VMware supported and recommended configuration options when implementing a WSFC (previously known as Microsoft Service Cluster Service, or MSCS) with disk resources shared across nodes of a cluster.
There’s a lot of conflicting materials on the Internet describing how to configure a Windows Failover Cluster (WSFC) on VMware vSphere platform. UPDATE 1: Starting with VMware vSAN 6.7 U3 vSAN provides native support for a clustered disk resource for WSFC! Check this article for more information how to configure vSAN for shared disk. Check this document and the guide for more details.
UPDATE 2: VMware vSphere 7.0 now supports shared (clustered) VMDK! A VMDK can be used as a shared disk resource for a WSFC deployed on a VMs hosting on different ESXi hosts (CaB).