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I have a 4 node Hyper-V cluster running on Windows 2008 R2. Prior to my tenure, the cluster had only single links to the SAN. I added redundant links but now I need to enable MPIO on all of the nodes.

Has anyone enabled MPIO on an existing cluster? I realize that I will have to reboot each Hyper-V node as I install MPIO, but I cant find any recommendations from Microsoft on doing this on a running cluster.

longneck
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We had a similar situation while migrating our cluster to a different SAN vendor. I don't think M$ has any particular guidance on the issue.

Most DSMs for MPIO require a server reboot prior to use. Assuming your cluster is using cluster shared volumes, you can live migrate your guests to another host while you establish multipathing. Failover clustering doesn't particularly care about multipathing, since that is handled on a per-machine basis, so you can establish MPIO one machine at a time. If you're really paranoid, you can remove the affected node from the cluster while you set up MPIO, then rejoin it.

Just did this last week and it worked fine...

newmanth
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  • One thing I just thought about... you have to be extra careful if your guests use the SAN network connections too. Before adding the additional connection to the virtual switch, make sure ALL of your cluster nodes have the connection set up. Of course, if you need to install the DSM for MPIO on the guests, they'll need to be rebooted too... – newmanth May 17 '12 at 17:58
  • installing MPIO on 2008r2 did not require a reboot. however, enabling iSCSI support in the MPIO control panel did require a reboot, and so did installing my vendor's DSM. – longneck May 24 '12 at 14:49