The original post: /r/homelab by /u/OstentatiousOpossum on 2024-04-29 22:24:44.

I wanted to build a two-node Hyper-V cluster. When I first came up with this idea, I started playing around with Starwind VSAN Free in a sandbox, I was able to make it work, so I figured I could use it as a CSV (Cluster Shared Volume).

A couple years passed until I’ve gotten around to actually building the cluster. I have spent a couple weeks trying make that wonderful piece of software (VSAN) work, but I failed miserably. I looked at my notes from earlier, searched online, checked out their example scripts, but to no avail. Long story short, I gave up. I read quite a few negative reviews about it, and I figured that if I can’t make it work within a few weeks (with 20+ years of sysadmin experience), it’s probably not worth the hassle, and without proper documentation and having no support, I would be deep sh*t if it crapped on itself later on.

So for the time being, I have two standalone Hyper-V servers, and started clustering the apps running in the VMs (keepalived, heartbeat, WNLB, DAG, etc.), but I still haven’t totally dismissed the idea of a decent Hyper-V cluster.

I don’t want to buy used storage systems, since all I have seen so far were somewhat pricey and huge energy hogs. And new storages are prohibitively expensive.

Then it occurred to me— what if I bought two identical servers with RAID 1 storages, hooked them up to 10G, set up block device replication using DRBD, and installed an iSCSI target on them (along with Heartbeat). In theory, I could use it as CSV for Hyper-V.

Has any one of you used DRBD with iSCSI target as a storage backend for virtualization? What was your experience?

Any suggestions as to what hardware I should use? It would be good if I could squeeze two computers in a 1U rack space, but could also install an SFP+ NIC, and two 2,5” SATA SSDs (or two NVMes?)