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Hi Cluster Fans, This blog post will clarify planning considerations around quorum in a Failover Cluster and answer some of the most common questions we hear. The quorum configuration in a failover cluster determines the number of failures that the cluster can sustain while still remaining online...

Hi, In this series of blog posts we will help you to design, develop and debug the Resource DLL you are developing to give your application high-availability with Windows Server 2008 & 2008 R2 Failover Clustering. We recommend you start with the other blog post in the series: ·...

Hi, A few weeks ago we gave an overview of the cluster quorum model: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2010/05/14/10012930.aspx This week we will provide some more details about when and how the different types are used. Node Majority & Node and Disk Majority The...

Hi, The Clustering team is coming to TechEd New Orleans from June 7-10! Sign up now at: http://northamerica.msteched.com/ In addition to many technical presentation, t he team will be manning the Cluster Booth (Orange - WSV - 7) throughout the week, so please stop by to ask your...

Failover clusters ensure that workloads such as File Server, Exchange, SQL, and Virtual Machines are highly available. These resources are considered highly available if the nodes that host resources are up, however the cluster generally requires more than half the nodes to be running, which is known...

Hi Cluster Fans, Over the next few weeks the cluster team is offering a series of public TechNet webcasts focusing on Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2. High Availability Server Apps with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clusters Link: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails...

Hi Cluster Fans, The MVP program is a way in which we thank active members in the Cluster and HA community for their contributions towards growing and supporting our products ( more info ). Our MVP program focuses on the Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing technologies. We are looking...

Hi Cluster Fans, Many of you use Failover Clustering to prov ide high-availability to your print servers to ensure that the print spooler resource stays up and running. We have recently released a Rollup Hotfix specific to print clustering which contains several fixes to improve the stability of...

Since Failover Clustering traditionally requires shared storage (you could also use hardware or software replication between nodes), we get a lot of questions about which shared storage types we support. Windows Server Failover Clustering has a very flexible storage model that allows a wide variety of...

With Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) one of the nodes in the cluster is responsible for synchronization of access to files on a shared volume. This is the node which currently owns the cluster ‘Physical Disk’ resource associated with that LUN, which is referred to as the Coordinator node. Each...

Hi Cluster Fans, We have added Windows Server 2008 R2 PowerShell help on TechNet and have updated our Management Packs to support 2008 R2 for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM), for both Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing. PowerShell Help Online With PowerShell help online...

Hi cluster fans, This week Microsoft is launching an end-to-end solution to help customers deploy integrated Site Recovery Solutions ( http://blogs.technet.com/virtplanet/ ). This launch shows how Microsoft and partners like HP, EMC, HDS, NetApp, DataCore, DoubleTake and SteelEye are leveraging...

Hi, In recent posts I discussed how to create and configure Generic Applications and Generic Services . In this post I will talk about creating the third of our generic containers, Generic Scripts. What is Generic Script Resource Type? The Generic Script resource type allows us to achieve...

Hi Cluster fans, In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to rename a couple of objects in your failover clusters using the new PowerShell CMDlets we’ve introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2. Trying to rename a cluster group in the GUI is easy, just right-click on the group, rename, enter the...

Hi, This post will discuss changing values of cluster objects using PowerShell in Windows Server 2008 R2. For resources and other components in a cluster, every cluster object has properties (common property). Parameters (private properties) are optional and a cluster object may or may not have...

Hi Cluster Fans, In Windows Server 2008 R2 we have added performance counters for Failover Clustering. Performance counters are like meters you have on some devices in your house. For instance, your electrical or water meter tracks what utilities you have consumed or your thermometer shows you the...

Hi cluster fans, Amongst the list of new features we introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering is “read-only cluster access”. Before Windows Server 2008 R2, you were either given full control on the cluster or no control at all. If you wanted to give anyone access to your cluster...

Hi, The first post in this series looked at two changes that have been implemented in Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering to improve group distribution and resource load balancing amongst nodes, so that each node is more likely to receive an equal number of groups after certain events (such...

In Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering, some changes have been made and new features added with regard to group placement and resource load balancing. These changes make it easier to manage clustered Hyper-V virtual machines, as well as other clustered roles, so that they are hosted on the best...

Hi Clustering and Scripting fans, If you’ve done any work with PowerShell v1.0 or v2.0, you have probably realized by now how rich the library of cmdlets is. There are a ton of cmdlets that allow you to automate almost any and everything across the system to use PowerShell. Here is one more thing...

Hi Cluster Fans, In this post we will discuss some of the implementation details around the Network Name (“NetName”) resource and its behavior in Windows Server 2008 R2. Introduction The purpose of Network Name is to allow clients to be able to resolve the DNS name to an IP Address to establish...

In Window Server 2008 Failover Clustering, the team invested significant time into making clustering easier. In the Windows Server 2008 R2 release we have continued down that path, adding several troubleshooting enhancements. One of the important aspects of troubleshooting a service outage is doing...

The “Double-Hop” Problem Most of the newly added PowerShell cmdlets (“command-lets”) in Windows Server 2008 R2 allow easy remote execution by including the -Cluster parameter to indicate the target cluster. However there are occasions when this capability cannot be used for different reasons, such...

With Windows Server 2008 (and R2) Failover Clustering you can make almost anything highly-available. This does not only include programs and applications, but you can make any service running on the cluster highly available – even if it is custom or from a 3 rd party. These can be created, managed by...

Hi cluster fans , Our general recommendation for achieving high-availability of Internet Information Services (IIS) servers is by using Network Load Balancing (NLB) since the servers tend to be hosts for stateless requests – a customer will visit a website, access content, then leave, and it doesn...