Windows 2003 Server Cluster Problem

Windows 2003 Server Clustering Consulting Services

For Windows 2003 Server Clustering solutions, the term high availability is used rather than fault tolerant. Fault-tolerant technology offers a higher level of resilience and recovery. Fault-tolerant servers typically use a high degree of hardware redundancy plus specialized software to provide near-instantaneous recovery from any problems with any single hardware or software fault. These solutions cost significantly more than a Windows Clustering solution because organizations must pay for redundant hardware that waits in an idle state for a fault.

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Server Clusters Overview

Server clusters do not guarantee non-stop operation, but they do provide sufficient availability for most mission-critical applications. The cluster service can monitor applications and resources and automatically recognize and recover from many failure conditions. This provides flexibility in managing the workload within a cluster. It also improves overall system availability. Server clusters allow client access to applications and resources in the event of failures and planned outages. If one of the servers in the cluster is unavailable because of a failure or maintenance requirements, resources and applications move to other available cluster nodes.

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Windows 2003 Server Cluster Installation

During the installation process, some nodes will be shut down while others are being installed. This step helps guarantee that data on disks attached to the shared bus is not lost or corrupted. This can happen when multiple nodes simultaneously try to write to a disk that is not protected by the cluster software. The default behavior of how new disks are mounted has been changed in Windows 2003 Server from the behavior in the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. In Windows 2003, logical disks that are not on the same bus as the boot partition will not be automatically mounted and assigned a drive letter. This helps ensure that the server will not mount drives that could possibly belong to another server in a complex SAN environment. Although the drives will not be mounted, it is still recommended to avoid any problems that you follow the procedures below to be certain the shared disks will not become corrupted.

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