We have a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V VM that has multiple drives attached via iSCSI directly to a SAN. These drives are accessed through multiple other 2012 R2 VM's using UNC paths to add and fetch files (very rare to update/delete). The files are created by an internal process and viewed later by users.
If the VM connected to the iSCSI storage goes offline then all of our file processing has to stop – we can't generate and save new files and users can't view them. This is a single point of failure.
Is there a technology that we can implement that would connect the iSCSI drives to another VM if the first VM goes offline (planned or unplanned)?
Our SAN doesn't have the capability of presenting the drive as a NAS (this would make our life easier). Is it possible to use Windows Failover Clustering to provide some redundancy by connecting the iSCSI drives to wherever the primary is? All I could find was iSCSI Target failover, but I don't think this is what I need.
Any ideas?
Best Answer
There is a technology called Multipath I/O that basically handles what you have described: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725907(v=ws.11).aspx
In order to achieve Hypervisor-level redundancy you will need to create the Failover Cluster. After this you will be able to configure HA VMs, SOFS or "failover File Server" roles that seems to be the goal you are trying to achieve.
Nevertheless, high availability with all above mentioned can be only achieved using the shared storage. You may need 2 physical NAS servers or 2 hosts with some "virtual SAN" software installed.
Take a look at StarWind Virtual SAN or HPE VSA. As far as I know, they both have free versions available with some limitations.
StarWind: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/
HPE VSA: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/storage-software/product-detail.html?oid=5306917