Logo
programming4us
programming4us
programming4us
programming4us
Home
programming4us
XP
programming4us
Windows Vista
programming4us
Windows 7
programming4us
Windows Azure
programming4us
Windows Server
programming4us
Windows Phone
 
Windows Server

Windows Server 2008 R2 high-availability and recovery features : Installing and Administering Failover Clustering (part 8) - Administering a Failover Cluster

- Free product key for windows 10
- Free Product Key for Microsoft office 365
- Malwarebytes Premium 3.7.1 Serial Keys (LifeTime) 2019
4/21/2014 2:11:31 AM

Administering a Failover Cluster

After you set up a new cluster, you will need to make sure that you are familiar with the management interface and understand how to perform basic cluster administration tasks. You also need to have an understanding of how to monitor the health of your cluster as well as how to perform regular maintenance. Each cluster has four primary areas for administration and monitoring:

  • Services and Applications

  • Nodes

  • Storage

  • Networks

  • Cluster Events

Services and applications

This section is used to manage the application or service supported by the cluster. For example, this node can be used to create new shared folders on a file server cluster. You can also use the Services and Applications node to manually failover the cluster in the event that you want to test failover capabilities or perform maintenance on the primary node. Additionally, the Services and Applications node allows you to run a dependency report which will graphically display all dependencies in the cluster as seen in Figure 31.

Figure 31. Cluster dependency report.

Best Practices

Applying updates and patching cluster nodes

As best practice, you should apply service packs and updates to a passive node of the cluster first. After applying the updates, move the cluster to the passive node, and then apply updates to the nodes that were previously active.


Nodes

The Nodes section allows you to manage existing cluster nodes as well as add new ones. By adding new nodes, you can provide additional availability to the cluster; however, if you change the number of nodes, you may need to change the quorum setting. You can also use the Nodes section to evict nodes form the cluster. In the event that a node fails, you may need to use the evict option to remove it from the cluster.

Storage

The Storage section is used to add and remove storage to and from the cluster. If new disks are configured, they should be added to the cluster, using the Add Disk option. You can also use the Storage section to simulate a failure of the quorum disk. This is helpful in testing what types of failures your cluster can tolerate, without going offline.

Notes From the Field

Cluster shared volumes for Hyper-V

If you are using the cluster to host Hyper-V virtual machines, and you want to provide Live Migration services, you will need to enable CSV by right clicking on the cluster node and selecting the option to Enable Cluster Shared Volumes. You should only select this option if the cluster will be supporting Hyper-V fail-over and Live Migration.


Networks

The Networks section allows you to administer the network settings for the cluster. These settings include specifying which networks can be used for cluster communications and which can be used for client connectivity (see Figure 32). For example, you may want to ensure that the cluster cannot perform node-to-node communications through the iSCSI network.

Figure 32. Cluster Network Properties.


Cluster Events

The Cluster Events section can be used to monitor Windows events related to the failover cluster. This includes configuration warnings and critical errors such as failover events (see Figure 33). These events should be reviewed on a regular basis either manually or by monitoring tools such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. Error events in this log typically represent a degradation in the health of the cluster.

Figure 33. Cluster Event Log.

Using PowerShell to manage Failover Clusters

You can use PowerShell to perform many common administrative tasks for Failover Clusters. This provides an easy way to manage a cluster from the command line and also to automate tasks using scripts. It is recommended that you use PowerShell over the cluster.exe command line tool as cluster.exe is being deemphasized and may not be available in future versions of Windows. Let us take a look at a couple of PowerShell commands that can be used to help manage a cluster.

Move-ClusterGroup—This command can be used to manually fail the cluster over to a passive node. For example:

Move-ClusterGroup –name FileServer1 will manually move the file server to any available passive node.

You could also issue the command Move-ClusterGroup –name FileServer1 –node ClusNode2 to specify which passive node to fail the cluster over to. This command could be helpful if you have an automatically schedule patch install for clustered servers. You could create a PowerShell script that will manually failover the cluster and schedule it to run after the passive node has been patched.

Test-Cluster—This command can be used to run the validation wizard from the command line. This command can be used to regularly automate running the validation test. For example, you could create a PowerShell script that issues the following command:

Test-Cluster –ReportName Z:\ClusterValidationReport.mht. This would run the validation wizard and save the report on the Z: drive which could easily be a shared folder on a network server.

Other -----------------
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 : Installing the Client Access Server - Installing the Client Access Server Role
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 : Understanding the Client Access Server (part 4) - Availability Service, POP and IMAP
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 : Understanding the Client Access Server (part 3) - ActiveSync Remote Wipe, Outlook Anywhere
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 : Understanding the Client Access Server (part 2) - ActiveSync
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 : Understanding the Client Access Server (part 1) - OWA
- Windows Server 2012 : Enhanced security and compliance (part 2) - BitLocker enhancements, DNSSEC
- Windows Server 2012 : Enhanced security and compliance (part 1) - Dynamic Access Control
- Windows Server 2012 : Full Windows experience (part 2) - Configuring User Profile Disks
- Windows Server 2012 : Full Windows experience (part 1) - RemoteFX enhancements,Configuring RemoteFX, Enhanced USB redirection
- Windows Server 2012 : Support for open standards
 
 
Top 10
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Adding Structure to Your Diagrams - Finding containers and lists in Visio (part 2) - Wireframes,Legends
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Adding Structure to Your Diagrams - Finding containers and lists in Visio (part 1) - Swimlanes
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Adding Structure to Your Diagrams - Formatting and sizing lists
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Adding Structure to Your Diagrams - Adding shapes to lists
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Adding Structure to Your Diagrams - Sizing containers
- Microsoft Access 2010 : Control Properties and Why to Use Them (part 3) - The Other Properties of a Control
- Microsoft Access 2010 : Control Properties and Why to Use Them (part 2) - The Data Properties of a Control
- Microsoft Access 2010 : Control Properties and Why to Use Them (part 1) - The Format Properties of a Control
- Microsoft Access 2010 : Form Properties and Why Should You Use Them - Working with the Properties Window
- Microsoft Visio 2013 : Using the Organization Chart Wizard with new data
 
programming4us
Windows Vista
programming4us
Windows 7
programming4us
Windows Azure
programming4us
Windows Server