Windows Server Failover Clustering

Windows Server Failover Clustering is well suited for organizations that need to have systems running in a high-availability mode. If there are systems that would pose a high cost to the business if there is downtime due to unplanned events, then Windows Server Failover Clustering will help assure 24/7 uptime. Also, clustering can be helpful for planned events, such as server updates. You can install an upgrade on the inactive node and then fail-over manually, switching the active and inactive nodes, upgrade the other node, and then failback. Also, while I don't have direct experience with this aspect, my understanding is that Windows Server Failover Clustering is also well suited for load balancing VMs.

Online documentation is excellent. Everything I needed to know, I learned from the online documentation. I haven't used phone support as I haven't needed to but would presume it is similar to Microsoft Support for other products that I've used. Phone support from Microsoft is hit and miss. It depends on who you get. That said, my rating is based on the online documentation.

For us it's a no brainer, we're a Microsoft tech house so to have a couple of physical boxes to spread the load and provide redundancy it the only way to go. Included in the OS so it makes sense to make use of it.

It's so widely used you are going to find plenty of resources online and forums on which to ask should you not. I'm pretty sure that the "issues" that we have come up against all have been solved via a quick Google!

Windows Failover Clustering is a good fit for a medium to a large organization with a predominantly Windows Server environment. VMware and Linux shops have their own clustering options. A cost-benefit analysis should be used before deploying a cluster, as extra capacity for failover is an additional expense. As servers are quite reliable, stand-alone hypervisors can be a better fit for a small business, which can tolerate outages for maintenance. While Failover Clustering feature itself is included in the Windows Server license, cost of extra servers and especially SANs (if used) is significant. The organization must calculate whether reduced downtime is worth the expense, especially considering that clustering by itself does not guarantee high availability.

Usability of Failover Clustering on Windows Server is generally good. Failover Clustering console is not hard to understand if the complexity of the product is taken into account. Most of the task on the Cluster can be done via PowerShell, so automation is possible and not hard (PowerShell is very intuitive). Configuring storage is the hardest and most confusing task during cluster configuration, so storage configuration should be planned in advance. Cluster Validation Wizard is verbose but most of the errors are easy to understand.

We never contacted Microsoft regarding Failover Clustering. Documentation is mostly good and readily available. Not much can be said here.