Synology HA as SAN for Hyper-V Virtualization Cluster

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
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I have a pair of identical Synology Flash Station FS2500’s where one is dormant and one is actively serving VHD’s as a SAN to a single Hyper-V Server. Connection is via ISCSI. My desire is to increase robustness of the entire system as its importance has grown from 3 vm’s to over 25 vms running our critical business operations. I am going to convert the Hyper-V into a Hyper-V cluster with 2 nodes and am trying to decide what the storage should look like. I guess my options are HA on the synology side, Replication on the synology side, or replication on the Hyper-V side of things though this is my first time evaluating any of these choices. I do have an MSP to help me in this but i really want to be armed with the best possible information to choose the proper configuration. My goal is to limit downtime as best as i can. Live migration of the VM’s between the Hyper-V nodes is critical if i have to reboot the individual nodes. I know that Synology needs far less rebooting than windows but trying to stop all of those VM’s and then restarting them gracefully is a painful process for my use case. Does anyone have any experience or suggestions. Cabling is not a limitation.

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It’s been a while since I covered HA for Synology but as far as I know it works much the same today as it did a few years back.

Having two hosts with each being capable of running the production workload on their own is a good idea both for doing maintenance and in case of a total host failure. Having the Synology systems in an HA setup solves the challenge of keeping them both synced and adds automated failover with hopefully minimal disruption. One more consideration if the budget allows is having redundant switches. While switch failures are generally less common it’s something to consider. Even having a spare switch on site would help as you are at a full stop if the storage switching fails.

[ EXTERNAL NETWORK / LAN ]
                 |
        _________|_________
       |                   |
  [ SWITCH A ]-------[ SWITCH B ]  <--- Redundant Network Fabric
    (VLANs)            (VLANs)         (Storage & Management)
       |  \             /  |
       |   \___________/   |
       |    ___________    |
       |   /           \   |
  [ HOST 01 ]         [ HOST 02 ]  <--- Virtualization Hosts
  (Hyper-V)           (Hyper-V)   
       |   \           /   |
       |    \_________/    |
       |     _________     |
       |    /         \    |
  [ SYNOLOGY A ]<========>[ SYNOLOGY B ]
    ( ACTIVE )    Heartbeat   ( PASSIVE )
        |                        |
        |           Shared Virtual IP (iSCSI/NFS)
        \________________________/
                    |
              [ DATA LUN ]
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Thank you Tom,

I am just concerned a bit by the limited information out here. Thank you for all the information you provide

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