One of the powerful features of Windows Server is the ability to create Windows Failover Clusters. With Windows Failover clustering, pools of hardware resources can be bound together in a virtual entity that allows seamlessly hosting resources in a way that is highly available and resilient to failure. Windows Server has certainly evolved over the past several iterations and releases. Now, with Windows Server 2019, Windows Failover Clustering is more powerful than ever and can host many highly available resources for business-critical workloads.

• Windows Failover Cluster Powershell
• What Is Windows Failover Cluster
• Windows Failover Cluster File Share Witness
• Windows Failover Cluster Dns
• Windows Failover Cluster Ports
• Windows Failover Cluster 2016
• Windows Failover Cluster Disk

Let’s take a look at Windows Server Failover Clustering types and uses for hosting resources.

Windows clustering is a strategy that uses Microsoft Windows and the synergy of independent multiple computers linked as a unified resource - often through a local area network (LAN). Clustering is more cost-effective than a single computer and provides improved system availability, scalability and reliability. Windows clustering also provides. You are correct in saying that there is no way (currently) to have Virtual machine (in Azure) running Virtual machine on it. Hyper-V on Azure VM is not possible, but you can have an Azure VM as a node for Failover Cluster. There is unfortunately no option to have a Hyper-V cluster in Azure. Regards, Sapna Girish. What’s a Failover Cluster Quorum. A Failover Cluster Quorum configuration specifies the number of failures that a cluster can support in order to keep working. Once the threshold limit is reached, the cluster stops working. The most common failures in a cluster are nodes that stop working or nodes that can’t communicate anymore. Microsoft Failover Clustering is a cooperative system component that enables applications, services, and even scripts to increase their availability without human intervention. Anywhere from one to sixty-four physical hosts are combined into a single unit, called a Failover Cluster. Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is a feature of the Windows Server platform for improving the high availability (HA) of applications and services. WSFC, which is the successor to Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), can be administered through the Failover Cluster Manager snap-in.

Windows Server 2019 Failover Clustering Types and Uses

Supremefx drivers windows 10. As mentioned earlier, the functionality in the latest version of Windows Server is more capable than ever before with various forms of Windows Failover Clustering functionality able to back multiple types of business-critical services.

Let’s take a look at the following types of Windows Server 2019 Failover Clustering.

• Hyper-V Clustering
• Clustering for File Services
• Scale-Out File Server
• Application Layer Clustering
• Host Layer Clustering
• Tiered Clustering

Each provides tremendous capabilities to ensure production workloads are resilient and highly available.

Hyper-V Clustering

In the realm of virtualization in the enterprise running production workloads, to effectively run Hyper-V in a resilient and highly available fashion, Hyper-V cluster configurations are required. Hyper-V clusters are built on top of Windows Failover Clusters.

How is the Hyper-V cluster architected?

In a traditional Hyper-V cluster, all Hyper-V hosts are connected to shared storage. This allows VMs to reside on storage that all hosts have access to, allowing all hosts to share ownership of the various virtual machines. If a host fails, healthy hosts are able to assume the responsibility of providing compute for the virtual machines assumed from a downed host.

A Hyper-V cluster internally monitors the other Hyper-V hosts so when a host goes down, VMs can be spun up relatively quickly on the healthy hosts. This is done by simply restarting the VMs connected to healthy hosts in the cluster. This highlights the “Failover” in Windows Failover Clustering.

Clustering is not only beneficial when an unforeseen problem arises; it is also beneficial to perform needed maintenance on a Hyper-V host. Using Hyper-V Live Migration, virtual machines can be moved while they are running to different hosts in the Hyper-V cluster to safely evacuate all workloads from a particular host so that maintenance can be performed.

Hyper-V clustering allows for intelligent load balancing for virtual machines running on top of the Hyper-V hosts that make up the Hyper-V Windows Failover Cluster. Much like VMware vSphere’s DRS mechanism, Hyper-V can evaluate Hyper-V hosts and their present load and automatically decide if workloads need to be moved for more efficient placement inside the Hyper-V cluster.

Clustering for File Services

The Clustering for File Services Clustering technology has been around perhaps the longest of any of the other types of clustering use cases. This was one of the original ideas behind clustering technology. This was so that file resources could be made highly available in case a single server failed.

Windows Failover Cluster Powershell

The Clustering for File Services clustering technology works in an active-passive configuration.

Only one file server is active for user connections to files. However, if this active server goes down, the passive server(s) in the cluster will become the active file server that accepts end user connections.

Scale-Out File Server

Traditional Clustering for File Services technology is not robust enough to handle the ever-demanding needs of today’s enterprise, especially considering the storage needs to back virtual machines in a Hyper-V Cluster environment.

As mentioned in the previous section, the Clustering for File Services technology is an active-passive configuration. This is not robust enough for high bandwidth, resiliency, and redundancy requirements of virtual hard disk files. This is where Scale-Out File Server or SOFS comes in.

Scale-Out File Server is designed for hosting high-performance workloads such as Hyper-V storage. SOFS allows supporting the requirements of Hyper-V storage. It does this in an active-active configuration of multiple file servers that have persistent connections between them. If one of the SOFS hosts goes down, another SOFS host picks up the workload without any type of migration or failover process. This allows running Hyper-V virtual machines to stay online even during a failure of an SOFS backing file server host.

Application Layer Clustering

Application Layer Clustering is a feature that can be utilized if a service or application needs to have the most uptime possible, regardless of any hardware failures. As already covered, Hyper-V hosts clustered in a Windows Failover Cluster can restart a VM in the event one of the Hyper-V hosts fails. However, this means any applications the VM is hosting will be unavailable during the time required to restart the VM.

If this time of service interruption, albeit brief, is unacceptable, Application Layer Clustering is certainly an option. Application Layer Clustering can be thought of as “nested” clustering. It involves creating a Windows Failover Cluster using VMs running on top of the physical Windows Failover Cluster hosts. This allows the application to be highly available in addition to the physical Hyper-V hosts backing the Hyper-V Cluster VMs.

Host Layer Clustering

Host Layer Clustering is the general term used to describe the technology we have already referred to when talking about Hyper-V Clustering. This is the clustering of the physical Windows Server Failover hosts. This allows clustering two or more physical servers using the Windows Failover Clustering technology to make various roles highly available. Notable among these in today’s production data centers is the Hyper-V role.

What Is Windows Failover Cluster

Windows Failover Cluster File Share Witness

Tiered Clustering

When it comes to production workloads, generally the component that matters the most to end users or business stakeholders is the application. However, to ensure that application is resilient and redundant, a tiered clustering approach can be used where both a combination of Host Layer Clustering and Application Layer Clustering are used to ensure both the VM is resilient and redundant (host layer clustering) and the application itself is resilient and redundant (application layer clustering). This allows providing the most resilient configuration possible to ensure the most uptime and high availability for business-critical workloads.

Concluding Thoughts

Clustering technology has certainly evolved from the early days with legacy versions of Windows Server. Windows Server 2019 Failover Clustering types and uses have certainly expanded the various applications of Windows Server Failover Clustering technology and broadened its scope in the enterprise.

Today’s business-critical workloads are required to be more and more resilient and redundant to support “always on” infrastructure driving today’s very web-centric businesses. Windows Server 2019 Failover Clustering supports these new and demanding use cases with a combination of various cluster types and applications of clustering technologies.

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What is Failover Clustering?

Failover clustering – a Windows Server feature that enables you to group multiple servers together into a fault-tolerant cluster and provides you new and improved features for software-defined datacenter customers and many other workloads running clusters on physical hardware or in virtual machines.

A failover cluster is a group of independent computers that actually work together to improve availability and scalability of clustered roles (formerly called clustered applications and services). Physical cables and softwares are used to connect the clustered servers. If one or more of the cluster nodes fail, the service is provided by other nodes(a process known as failover). In addition, proactive monitoring is done to the clusters to verify that they are working properly. If they are not working, they are restarted or moved to another node.

Cluster Shared Volume(CSV)

Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) is a functionality provided by Failover clusters, that provides a consistent, distributed namespace that clustered roles can use to access shared storage from all nodes. With the Failover Clustering feature, users experience a minimum of disruptions in service.

Failover Clustering has many practical applications, including:

• For applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Hyper-V virtual machines, Highly available or continuously available file is used to share storage
• Highly available clustered roles that run on physical servers or on virtual machines that are installed on servers running Hyper-V

We are going to see how to deploy and configure Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2016.

Before we start, attach a iSCSI storage in all the nodes and make sure all virtual switches in nodes are identical.

1. Add the nodes to the domain server and login with domain administrator user and install Failover Cluster through Server Manager
2. After successful installation, open Failover Cluster and click Create Cluster
3. Give next in the welcome page
4. Now browse and select the nodes and give next
5. In the next page give a name for cluster and IP address for cluster
6. Give next in the confirmation page to start the cluster configuration validation
7. As mentioned above, if all the configurations are correct you won’t get any error and the tests will pass
8. Now open Failover Cluster Manager, expand storage and click on disks
9. In this page click ADD Disk and select the available iSCSI storage
10. Then right click on the Cluster Disk and select Add to Cluster storage
11. You can check the storage by opening the C:ClusterStorage in all the nodes

Now we are ready to go.

Windows Server 2016 Failover Clusters new features

Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade

Windows Server 2016 with the new feature like Cluster OS Rolling upgrade, the Administrator can upgrade the Cluster Nodes Operating System from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 without stopping the Hyper-V Services. This new feature helps to avoid downtime penalties against Service Level Agreements (SLA). We have posted a blog on How to Upgrade 2012 R2 Cluster to 2016 using Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade please refer to it.

Cloud Witness for a Failover Cluster

A new type of quorum witness that leverages Microsoft Azure to help determine which cluster node should be considered authoritative if a node goes offline.

Health Service

Improves the day-to-day monitoring, operations, and maintenance experience of Storage Spaces Direct clusters.

Fault Domains

Enables you to define what fault domain to use with a Storage Spaces Direct cluster. A fault domain is a set of hardware that share a single point of failure, such as a server node, server chassis or rack.

VM load balancing

The load is distributed across nodes evenly with its help, in a Failover Cluster by finding out busy nodes and live-migrating VMs on these nodes to less busy nodes.

Simplified SMB Multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks

Enable’s easier configuration of multiple network adapters in a cluster.

Workgroup and Multi-domain clusters in Windows Server 2016

Previous versions of Windows Server along with 2012 R2, a cluster could only be created between member nodes joined to the same domain. Windows Server 2016 breaks down these barriers and introduces the ability to create a Failover Cluster without Active Directory dependencies. The following configuration is implemented in Failover Clusters can now, therefore, be created in:

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• Single-domain: Clusters with all nodes joined to the same domain
• Multi-domain: Clusters with nodes which are members of different domains
• Workgroup: Clusters with nodes which are member servers / workgroup (not domain joined)

Windows Failover Cluster Dns

Conclusion:

Windows Failover Cluster Ports

The new and enhanced features of Windows Server 2016 Failover Cluster has made Clustering and High-Availability much simpler and easier. In upcoming blogs, we can see the newly added features of Windows Server 2016 Failover Cluster.

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Windows Failover Cluster 2016

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Windows Failover Cluster Disk