Failover Cluster

The last month, I wanted to change the Witness of a cluster from a Cloud Witness to a File Share Witness. The cluster is a 2-node S2D cluster and as discussed with Microsoft, Cloud Witness should not be used with a 2-node cluster. If the Cloud Witness fails (for example when subscription has expired), the cluster can crashes. I’ve experienced ...

Before Windows Server 2016, the alerting and the monitoring of the cluster were managed by monitoring tools such as System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). The monitoring tool used WMI, PowerShell scripts, performance counters or whatever to get the health of the cluster. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has added the Health Service in the cluster that provides metrics and fault ...

Fault Domain Awareness is a new feature in Failover Clustering since Windows Server 2016. Fault Domain Awareness brings a new approach of the high availability which is more flexible and Cloud oriented. In previous edition, the high availability was based only on node: if a node failed, the resources were moved to another node. With Fault Domain Awareness, the point ...

This topic aims to explain the Quorum configuration in a Failover Clustering. As part of my job, I work with Hyper-V Clusters where the Quorum is not well configured and so my customers have not the expected behavior when an outage occurs. I work especially on Hyper-V clusters but the following topic applies to most of Failover Cluster configuration. What’s ...

The next release of Windows Server will provide a new feature called Rolling Cluster Upgrade. In other words, it will be possible to have nodes running on Windows Server 2012R2 and Windows Server vNext in the same cluster. This will ease the migration of all nodes in a cluster to the next Windows version and so the upgrade of the ...