I have several servers with local SATA/SAS RAID arrays. I would like to run there virtual machines with some level of automated failover – sync VM to secondary node in 1 minute interval and automated start when primary node died at least.
I've already created failover cluster with fileshare witness on another machine. In Failover Manager I'm not able to add any Disk, says "No suitable disk". I tried to add virtual iSCSI disk via MS iSCSI Target but it didn't appear either. Hyper-V Replica Broker can't be enabled without shared stored.
How to achieve failover with current hardware on Hyper-V? If not is there any other virtualization platform for my needs? Based on my search with VMWare I would need HA + vSAN which is quite expensive, Google's Ganeti doesn't work well with Windows guests.
Best Answer
You have two options in order to create a Hyper-V Failover Cluster using your current hardware:
1) Windows Server 2016 with Storage Replica http://www.tech-coffee.net/storage-replica/ that assumes a manual failover in case one of the servers fails or Storage Spaces Direct http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/what-storage-spaces-direct that need at least 4 hosts https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/microsoft-storage-spaces-direct-4-node-setup/ but provides you automated failover and so on.
2) 3rd party software like StarWind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san
that can take your local disks and mirror them between hosts providing those highly available storage instances as shared storage for your Hyper-V cluster. In case you would like to create an SMB 3.0 based failover cluster using dedicated servers for storage you can use their free version https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free