Last October I posted on our updated policy for support of SQL Server in a virtualization environment. This policy is based on a KB article that summarizes our policy. You recall this article is the following:
Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization ...
One fairly controversial aspect to this policy was our support (actually non-support is a better word) for “guest” failover clustering. We didn’t support installing SQL Server failover clustering in a virtual machine. Well this policy is now changed effective immediately as updated in the article.
The article now contains the following new wording on this topic:
Guest Failover Clustering is when you create a SQL Server failover cluster inside a virtual machine where the nodes are running as a virtual machine. A non-SVVP configuration that meets these requirements will receive support from Microsoft CSS per the policies documented in
897615 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/ ) Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software
It is important to read through some of these details:
The article on Windows 2008 Failover Clustering has 2 requirements:
Logo certification information is found at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/default.aspx
The Windows 2008 Failover Clustering article discusses the requirements for the validation test that must pass through the Failover Cluster Management snap-in.
There are likely to be some other questions on this topic and I’ll post updates to this blog as they come in. Stay tuned for my next blog post as i walk you through the steps to install SQL Server in a cluster with Hyper-V including what the clustering validation test looks like.
Bob Ward
Microsoft
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