Hi Cluster Fans,
The cluster team has been busy working on some great new features for Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2. Meanwhile our friends have written some great blog posts which you may find interesting.
Thanks,
Symon Perriman
Program Manager
Clustering & High Availability
Whitepaper: Windows Server 2008 R2 & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 - Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture
One of the most highly anticipated new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is live migration. This document describes the live migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V in detail, including how live migration moves running VMs and requirements for implementing live migration
Step-by-Step Guide for Hyper-V: Using Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446679.aspx
Live migration is a new Hyper-V feature in Windows Server 2008 R2, which requires the failover clustering role to be added and configured on the servers running Hyper-V. Live migration allows you to transparently move running virtual machines from one node of the failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without a dropped network connection or perceived downtime. In addition, failover clustering requires shared storage for the cluster nodes. This can include an iSCSI or Fiber-Channel Storage Area Network (SAN). All virtual machines are stored in the shared storage area, and the running virtual machine state is managed by one of the nodes.
File Share “Scoping” in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters
Implementing highly available file servers in Windows Server 2008 is very different from how it was done in previous versions of Microsoft's clustering technology. One of the new pieces of functionality implemented in highly available file servers is 'scoping' of shared folders. What this means is when a shared folder is created in a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster, it is not only associated with two other resources in the same resource grouping - a Client Access Point (CAP) and a File Server Resource, but it will be accessible only by way of the Network Name resource which is one of two components of a Client Access Point (CAP) (the other being an IP Address). Now, one may say, "That has been the way we have always accessed file shares in the past". This is true, but things have changed a little and that is what we will be discussing here.
Chuck Timon
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support
Configuring Auditing for a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster
The Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering auditing feature has been requested by customers and provides the capability to monitor, or audit, cluster access. The cluster auditing feature can be enabled to audit accesses (Success andor Failure) of an object. The object, in this case, will be the Microsoft Failover Cluster. This is accomplished by auditing client accesses to a cluster using Cluster APIs. This basically means that a client trying to access a cluster using either the Failover Cluster Management snap-in (Cluadmin.msc), the cluster.exe command line or any custom application that calls cluster APIs, will be subjected to auditing events if configured.
Chuck Timon
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support
Sorting out some myths and facts concerning Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering
You may be wondering why, at this point in time, we are publishing a blog such as this. That is a good question, but the answer is rather straightforward - because even though Windows Server 2008 has been out for awhile now, we are starting to see an increase in the number of customers starting to use the Failover Clustering feature. Some of these customers are still trying to apply the concepts from previous versions of Microsoft Clustering. Doing this sometimes causes problems and we end up getting calls. In an effort to head-off some of those calls, here are some myths and facts about Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. We hope these will help.
Chuck Timon & John Marlin
Senior Support Escalation Engineers
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support
Adding a disk to a Windows 2008 Failover Cluster using cluster.exe commands
This isn't specific to multi-site clustering, but I've certainly had to use this many times when adding devices to my multi-site clusters. In Windows 2008, Microsoft has added some new logic while adding disk resources to a cluster. In Windows 2008, when you attempt to "Add a disk" through the cluster administrator GUI, the cluster does a quick check on the available disks to ensure that the disks are present on all nodes of the cluster before presenting this as an available disk in the Cluster Administrator GUI. This can be bad for geo-clusters as the disks are unlikely read/write enabled on all sites, causing the cluster GUI to display an error message.
John Toner
Microsoft MVP – Clustering & HA
Support Technician, EMC
Webcast: Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2 Live Migration
http://www.savilltech.com/Videos/LiveMigration/LiveMigration640480.wmv
See this webcast covering Live Migration with Failover Clustering on Clustered Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2.
John Savill
MVP – Clustering and HA
Principal Architect, EMC Consulting
Webcast: Cluster Shared Volumes and NetFT Traffic Deep Dive
http://www.savilltech.com/Videos/CSVDeepDive/CSVDeepDive.wmv
This webcast looks at the networking functionality and improvements made by Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering.
John Savill
MVP – Clustering and HA
Principal Architect, EMC Consulting
Webcast: Clustering in a Virtual World
http://www.savilltech.com/Videos/Clustering_in_a_virtual_world/Clustering_in_a_virtual_world.wmv
The trends and technologies behind the “Virtual Datacenter” are discussed in this webcast. This is the vision of server consolidation on highly-available virtual machines using Windows Server Failover Clustering and Hyper-V.
John Savill
MVP – Clustering and HA
Principal Architect, EMC Consulting
Webcast: Exchange 2007 High Availability Deep Dive
http://www.savilltech.com/Videos/Ex2007HA/exch2007halrg.wmv
This webcasts provides an overview of Exchange 2007 using Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering.
John Savill
MVP – Clustering and HA
Principal Architect, EMC Consulting
John Savill's Virtualization and High Availability Blog
http://johnsavill.spaces.live.com/
Check out this new blog by Cluster MVP John Savill which will focus on Windows Server Failover Clustering and Hyper-V virtual machines.
Some recent posts include:
· Great Microsoft Virtualization Resources
· Making your Virtual Environment Highly Available the right way
I gave a live webinar yesterday for Windows IT Pro on how to make your Hyper-V based virtual environment highly available the right way which can be seen on http://www.ittv.net and on my video archive at http://www.savilltech.com/videos.html .
I wanted to go over some of the key points of that presentation here and primarily the different types of high availability available to us with Failover Clustering and Hyper-V.
John Savill
MVP – Clustering and HA
Principal Architect, EMC Consulting
PrintBRM.exe, 0×80070043 and Print Clusters - A Workaround
http://www.nullsession.com/2009/01/04/printbrmexe-and-print-clusters-a-workaround/
Since I’ve been working almost 24/7 over the holidays while migrating one huge environment (15.000 users) into a new one in a hurry. That is, without any previous knowledge of the old environment and a very tight schedule, I’ve been using all the shortcuts I can come up with. I quickly realized that PrintBRM would save my butt when it came to migrating printers. I still ended up adding them more or less manually since I migrated from Windows Server 2003 x86 to a Windows Server 2008 x64-based cluster and the time finding the right drivers for it to work flawlessly would’ve been longer than the manual add.
Joachim Nässlander
Microsoft MVP - File Systems & Storage
Senior Specialist, QBranch
Steps to move a DHCP database from a Windows Server 2003 or 2008 to another Windows Server 2008 machine
Microsoft
