PowerShell Help Online & Management Pack Updates for Failover Clustering & NLB

[John Marlin]

First published on MSDN on Nov 20, 2009

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 you can see the same information as the inbox Get-Help CMDlet in an easier to browse format, with more examples and information added over time.  The website can also be launched in your default web browser directly from PowerShell, assuming your machine has a web browser.  This is done by adding -Online to the Get-Help CMDlet.

Failover Clustering

The main site for PowerShell for Failover Clustering is at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee461009.aspx

Here’s an example for Failover Clustering:  PS > Get-Help Test-Cluster -Online

Network Load Balancing

The main site for PowerShell for Network Load Balancing is at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee817138.aspx

Here’s an example for Failover Clustering:  PS > Get-Help New-NLBCluster -Online

SCOM Management Pack Updates

We’ve updated our Management Packs for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) for both Failover Clustering & NLB to add news features and support Windows Server 2008 R2.

Failover Clustering

The SCOM Failover Clustering Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster deployments. It monitors Cluster services components—such as nodes, networks, and resource groups—to report issues that can cause downtime or poor performance.

The main site for the Management Pack for Failover Clustering is at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AC7F42F5-33E9-453D-A923-171C8E1E8E55 ...

Some of the improvements include:

·         Support for discovery and monitoring of Windows Server 2008 R2 clusters and functionality such as Cluster Shared Volumes

·         MP scalability improvements (the MP supports monitoring of 300 resource groups per cluster)

·         Noise reduction, for example clustered resources are no longer discovered and monitored by default (resource groups are monitored by default)

·         Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service

·         Alerts about connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller

·         Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster

·         Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)

·         Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share

·         Issues with the cluster storage

Network Load Balancing

The SCOM Network Load Balancing (NLB) Management Pack provides discoveries, monitors, alerts, and warnings to help the operator understand the state of NLB clusters and NLB servers running Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Management Pack can provide early warnings that an operator can use to proactively monitor the state of the NLB servers in the computing environment.

The main site for the Management Pack for Network Load Balancing is at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc17e093-bdd7-4cb3-9981-853776ed90be ...

Some of the improvements include:

·         Support for discovery and monitoring of Windows Server 2008 R2 NLB clusters

·         Monitor the NLB Node status

·         Based on the status of individual cluster nodes, determine the overall state of the cluster.

·         Where an integration management pack exists, determine the health state of a cluster node by looking at the health state of the load balanced application, such as IIS

·         Alert on errors and warnings that are reported by the NLB driver, such as an incorrectly configured NLB cluster

·         Ability to the node out of the NLB cluster if the underlying load-balanced application becomes unhealthy, and add the node back to the cluster when the application becomes healthy again

·         Noise reduction on some alerts

Enjoy these improvements to your clustering experience!

Thanks,

Symon Perriman

Program Manager II

Clustering & High-Availability

Microsoft