Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 2

This is a multipart series based on some lab test & work I did.

  1. Part 1 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 8 (Beta) – Part 1
  2. Part 2 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 2
  3. Part 3 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 3

Here’s part two of my adventures while upgrading or rather “transitioning” my Hyper-V cluster nodes to Windows 8. Transition is more correctly as you can not upgrade a cluster, you create a new cluster en recuperate the node. I did however not reinstall them but upgrade them. Why, because I can and I wanted to try it out to see what happens. For production purposes I do advise you to rebuild nodes from scratch using a well defined and automated plan if possible. I already mentioned this in Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 8 (Beta) – Part 1

So we stopped Part 1 with a evicted and upgraded node. We’ll want to create a new cluster with that node and then transition the other nodes over to the new Windows 8 cluster one by one, or in batches, depending on how many you can afford to take down at one time. In this part we’ll just build our new Window 8 cluster with a single node. It’s a good thing this is possible as we can start a transition with just one node. This an easy part.

First of all we create a new cluster. I will all look very familiar if you’ve ever created a Windows 2008 (R2) cluster.

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The Create Cluster Wizard appears, read all the advice you want and click “Next”

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We select the node that we evicted from the old cluster and upgraded to Windows 8

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You now run the validation test for your cluster

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Let’s run ‘m all and see what it has to say.

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We get a summary of what notes will be tested and what tests will be run. Click “Next”

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The tests are running.

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We get a pass with some warnings. So we click “View Report” to take a look. It’s OK we only have one node, we don’t have storage yet and networking wise we still need to configure some things but we can create a one node cluster, So click “Finish”

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I named my new cluster “warriors”, the old one was called “warrior”.

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I define the IP Address for the Access Point for administering the cluster

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We’re ready to create the cluster so we click “Next” and the creation process starts

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And we’re informed we’ve have successfully created a cluster. Click Finish. Any experienced cluster builder should find this process very familiar without surprises.

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So now we have a cluster existing out of one node and we haven’t got any storage assigned yet.

We have several options for storage here. We could assign new storage but we cannot do a Quick Storage Migration between cluster using SCVMM2008R2 but that doesn’t fly as SCVMM2008R2 can’t manage Windows 8 clusters and I don’t know if it ever will.  We can do a good old manual or scripted export and import of the VMs what takes a considerable amount of time.

We can recuperate the old storage with the VMs still on there. This could get tricky as no two cluster should be able to see & use the storage at the same time. The benefit could be that we can just use the import type in Windows 8 ("Register the virtual machine in-place" (use the existing unique ID) and be done with it. We’ll try that one. We’ll still have some down time but it should be pretty fast. It’s only from Windows 8 on that we’ll be able to do Shared Nothing Live Migrations between clusters Smile We’ll address that in Part 3.

3 thoughts on “Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 2

  1. Pingback: Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 3 | Working Hard In IT

  2. Pingback: Moving Clustered Virtual Machines to Windows Server 2012 with the Cluster Migration Wizard | Working Hard In IT

  3. you mentioned “Transition is more correctly as you can not upgrade a cluster, you create a new cluster en recuperate the node. I did however not reinstall them but upgrade them. ” Are you talking about the windows OS ?

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