Blog Archives

In this series of posts I’ll walk you through the steps, issues and frustrations of designing, building and configuring a low-power performance virtualisation cluster based on three nodes. It’s a write-as-I-go story which means I’ll cleanup the text when I … Continue reading →

This is the list of components that I ordered. The only thing you might need to add is the storage device. As I already have an iSCSI capable NAS, the QNAP TS-659 Pro+, this is all I need: 3x OEM … Continue reading →

I’ll create three physical and two virtual networks: 1. physical: DMZ This is the seperate network space I’ve created in which I can place my test hosts/environments, in this case the Binsfeldius Cluster. This address space is behind a firewall … Continue reading →

So finally the stuff has arrived, one big box filled with goodies And as the saying goes, all good things come in threes … Well, enough fun with the boxes. Let’s get to building this stuff 🙂  

In this post I’ll document the steps of putting the hardware together for a cluster node. A story in pictures: I’ve unscrewed and removed the cover of the Antec case. As you can see, there’s not much room to move … Continue reading →

Now that the node is assembled and hardware ready, it’s time to do some first configuration stuff such as flash update all firmwares, set the correct BIOS parameters and provide the NIC with the correct iSCSI settings to boot from … Continue reading →

I’ve created separate iSCSI targets with associated mapped LUN’s for each node. node 1 iSCSI initiator: n1bc –> iSCSI target: ttgbootn1 node 2 iSCSI initiator: n2bc –> iSCSI target: ttgbootn2 node 3 iSCSI initiator: n3bc –> iSCSI target: ttgbootn3 In … Continue reading →

Interesting stuff. To be able to fully utilize the Failover Clustering Feature of Microsoft, I run into an interesting quirk. While you can run a cluster based on a workgroup, you’d want to put it into a domain to get … Continue reading →

I’ve already talked a bit about LUN’s and storage. Let’s put everything together. I’m using a QNAP TS-659 Pro+ (12Tb raw storage) to be the iSCSI target and provide the mapped LUN’s. The QNAP is configured as 2-disk RAID1 and … Continue reading →

The sconfig. Although I love the computername the installer picked for me, I’ll change it to the following naming convention. Change computername (2) to nodename, in my case N1BC, N2BC or N3BC. I’ll use my second node (N2BC) for this … Continue reading →