At TechEd Berlin, back in November 2009, the subject of stretched Cluster Shared Volumes, or Geo-Clustering and Cluster Shared Volumes came up. The feedback I personally got was that this was not supported by Microsoft. However, after some discussion I found out that there are storage vendors that have solutions in this space e.g. HP LeftHand.
Firstly, if your organisation is going to consider Geo-Clustering and CSV, then I would urge them to definitely work with the storage vendor and make sure that they purchase some form of support agreement, specifically to cover this kind of solution.
While this article doesn’t concentrate on setting up Geo-Clustering or even CSV for that matter, since these aspects aren’t really the focus of this article. I wanted to share an architectural diagram of what the storage would look like and what steps you would need to be followed at a high level to set up the storage aspect:
Create one or more Management Group(s)
Create a Cluster (or Clusters), define the Disk RAID level and Virtual IP Address (or IP Addresses if multi site)
Create a Volume (or Volumes) and define the Network RAID level
Patrick Lownds