u/SuperR0ck

Looking for feedback from organizations running a 4-node Hyper-V S2D cluster (Rack Awareness enabled)

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in hearing from people who are running production Hyper-V clusters with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Rack Fault Domain Awareness.

Our environment has the following architecture:

Windows Server Failover Cluster
4 Hyper-V nodes
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D)
2 physical racks
2 nodes per rack
Rack Fault Domains configured correctly
Storage pool configured with Rack Awareness
2-way mirror resiliency
Cluster Shared Volumes (ReFS)
Around 100+ production virtual machines
Automatic Storage Rebalancing disabled (manual balancing only)

Networking

Each host has four physical NICs:

NIC 1 + NIC 2: Dedicated for the Hyper-V virtual switch (SET Team) carrying VM traffic.
NIC 3: Dedicated to storage, cluster communication and live migration.
NIC 4: Dedicated to storage, cluster communication and live migration.

The storage/cluster network uses SMB Multichannel across the two dedicated adapters. RDMA is not enabled (standard Ethernet only).

Our primary goal was to tolerate the complete loss of one rack while keeping production online.

During a recent Disaster Recovery test, we intentionally shut down the two nodes from one rack. The remaining two nodes successfully kept all VMs online for approximately two hours before the cluster started experiencing CSV Auto Pause events, CSV draining, storage instability and eventually multiple VM outages.

At this point I'm more interested in understanding how common this architecture is in real-world production.

Some questions for people running S2D:

Are you running a similar 4-node / 2-rack design?
Is Rack Awareness enabled?
Are you using RDMA, or are you successfully running without it?
How are your storage and cluster networks configured?
Have you ever tested losing an entire rack?
Did the cluster remain stable indefinitely, or only for a limited time?
Have you experienced CSV Auto Pause or storage instability after operating for an extended period on only half of the nodes?
Would you recommend this architecture today, or would you instead deploy more nodes or another topology?

I'm especially interested in hearing from organizations that have performed real DR tests rather than theoretical discussions.

Any lessons learned, Microsoft recommendations, or production experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi there.

I'm stuck in a nightmare trying to get pricing for my VMware renewal. It took almost two months just to get the first response.

My subscription expires in about six weeks, and I'm concerned I won't be able to complete the renewal in time.

In vCenter, all of my licenses show an expiration date of "Never."

https://imgur.com/XPjDZHv

If my subscription expires before the renewal is processed, should I expect any impact on the environment, or will I simply lose support and entitlement access while the environment remains fully operational?

Has anyone experienced hosts being disconnected or losing functionality after a subscription expired while the installed licenses still showed "Never" as the expiration date?

Thanks.

Update:

This is what broadcom support answered for this question

We will answer based on a basic environment. Any further specific inquiries relevant to your environment will require a different entitlement as this requires a full environment validation and this is not covered within Technical Support Entitlement scope.

The ESXi hosts and VMs should continue running normally, however you should not be able to power on or off VMs.

The vSAN should continue to operate normally.

There are no official grace periods.

And in some cases, you may not be able to assign new licenses or change editions during lapse.

Kindly note that this is in a very basic environment, this response does not mean that you might not face any issues of the mentioned.

Looking for feedback from organizations running a 4-node Hyper-V S2D cluster (Rack Awareness enabled)

Will vCenter disconnect my vSphere hosts if my subscription reaches its expiration date, even though all licenses in vCenter show an expiration date of "Never"?