I’m working on adding support for Microsoft Exchange clusters to the next version of my company’s product. In order to do that, I need to have an Exchange cluster to develop/test on. Ironically, assembling Windows machines into a cluster seems to decrease their stability at an exponential rate.

Microsoft’s clustering solution is pretty lame. Basically you set up two or more cluster nodes with access to some sort of shared disk bus, like SCSI, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel. The nodes talk amongst themselves and decide who will own the shared disk resources and run the clustered apps. Effectively, it’s an active/passive configuration.

Anyway, for our tests, I threw together a VM running Ubuntu Server 7.04, and put the iSCSI Enterprise Target on it. I added three 5GB virtual disks and exposed them as targets with IET.

I then installed the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator 2.04 on my two cluster nodes, and verified it could attach to the iSCSI targets. I formatted the drives and felt smugly self-satisfied.

However, the problem starts after I install Exchange 2003. Suddenly, stopping the clussvc (The Cluster Service) hangs the machine. Consistently. Hard. Wedged.

I tried using the Rocket StarWind iSCSI target instead; same problem. WTF?

I’ve spent days now trying to get this cluster stood up. I’m beginning to think the whole cluster thing is some sort of right-wing Zionist corporate conspiracy to sell high-price ‘cluster certified’ hardware to clueless IT boffins.