Hi Cluster Fans, Windows Server 2008 R2 has been our most popular release by far, with quick adoption for some of the great new features like Cluster Shared Volumes, PowerShell and live migration. With all the hype, I’ve been seeing a lot of questions...

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...

Hi Cluster Fans, In this post I will discuss a 2008 and 2008 R2 deployment issue which is sometimes seen, and how to get around it. Let’s say you want to Validate a server, create a cluster or add a node to a cluster. We have a requirement that...

Hi, In this series of blog posts we will review the Resource State Machine from the Resource Host Server (RHS or Resource Monitor) point of view. Hopefully it will help you to design, develop and debug the Resource DLL you are developing to integrate...

Hi Cluster Fans, Microsoft’s Windows Sustained Engineering (WinSE) organization has a job opening for a developer to support Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing (NLB) technologies. WinSE is Microsoft’s servicing branch which takes requests...

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...

Hi Cluster Fans, Our Validate a Configuration Wizard was so popular that we’ve improved it in Windows Server 2008 R2. Validate is the tool which verifies that your entire configuration is suitable for Failover Clustering. It will test the servers...

Hi Cluster Fans, We have recently added some Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering content on the web. Here are some of our recent publications with special thanks to Jan Keller and our technical writers. Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)...

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...

Hi Clustering PowerShell Scripters, One of the things we’ve provided in Failover Clustering PowerShell is a set of CMDlets to easily create highly available workloads in a cluster. PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-Command -Module FailoverClusters...

Hi, We are going to talk about a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 for Failover Clustering, ETW tracing. With this added functionality, we have provided a mechanism of tracing why NLB has decided to drop or accept a given network packet. ...

Happy Holidays Cluster Fans ! The System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 Beta is now available for download and testing. This supports backing up your Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) disks, in addition to the following Clustering and...

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...

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...

Hi, This post will describe several ways to install Network Load Balancing (NLB) using the command line interface. In Windows Server 2008 R2 installing Windows Features using scripts at the command line has changed a little since Windows Server...

Hi, This is the second blog is our series of posts on PowerShell for Network Load Balancing (NLB). The first post introduces you to the CMDlets: http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/10/28/9913877.aspx Most of NLB CMDlets have the...

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. ...

Hi Cluster Fans, Most of you are familiar with the Performance Monitor that allows you to work with performance counters. Details have been described in the three previous posts in the series: Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 . Using the command...

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...

Hi NLB Fans, NLB provides users with various methods to manage clusters. In Windows Server 2008, there are 3 ways to manage an NLB cluster: 1. Network Load balancing Manager GUI (nlbmgr.exe) 2. NLB command line tool (Nlb.exe) 3. NLB...

Hi cluster fans, This third post in our series about Failover Clustering Performance Counters will give some practical examples of how to use this new Windows Server 2008 R2 feature to help troubleshoot your cluster. In Part 1 of this blog series...

Hello! I am Rohan Mutagi. My job at Microsoft is to do something that everyone likes: criticize others J , specifically, other people’s code. Yes, I am a tester and it’s my role to find bugs in Network Load Balancing (NLB). Over the next few months...

Hi cluster scripting fans, I often find myself looking for the drive letter(s) for a physical disk resource in a PowerShell console/script. After a bit of investigation, here is a way to do that using Cluster WMI through PowerShell: $DiskResourceName...

Hi Cluster Fans, We’ve just published documentation describing the upgrade path for clustered VMs on 2008 Failover Clusters to 2008 R2 Failover Clusters. Hyper-V Upgrades: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957256 [Update: 11/12/09] A new cluster...

Hi Cluster Fans, In Part 1 of this blog series we discussed Performance Counters and their interaction with the Network, Multicast Request Reply, Global Update Manager and Database clustering components. This post will look at monitoring some additional...