Windows Server Failover Clustering

We utilized Windows Server Failover Clustering as an integral part of a MS SQL cluster setup. We utilized it for almost zero downtime on our Microsoft SQL serving our on prem Sharepoint implementations, as well as several critical IT infrastructure systems that need a SQL database back end. This allows us to perform maintenance and patching without affecting the applications that use the SQL server. It's deployed on a active passive setup. We also set up a test Hyper-V high availability cluster.

We are currently using Windows Server Failover Clustering to serve our Microsoft Hyper-V cluster. The cluster runs our production environment comprising of email services, file services, database services, remote access, and more. All Microsoft Hyper-V roles are clustered and their storage is also managed by the cluster. It is currently running in a two node environment.

We have Hyper-V implemented as our primary hypervisor and we have also implemented failover clustering with cluster storage and multipath IO to mitigate node failure without impacting our work loads, in case of cluster node failure it seamlessly migrates workloads to other hypervisors without any downtime, the other benefit is that when we are updating hypervisors we live migrate virtual machines to different nodes in same cluster and restart one by one that results in no downtime and hassle free operation. it simply made management of virtual machines simpler and improved overall uptime of our infrastructure.

We have Setup Windows Server Failover Clustering for our SQL Server Always On so that our databases are configured on Failover mode. In case any of our servers failing to respond this service will move our databases from the primary server to the disaster recovery server. Our Information technology department uses it and the user across the organization is not aware of what we have deployed or what is our architecture.

It is the backbone of our IT Infrastructure, It provides high availability of the servers to meet our business requirements, we are using it for failover solution of our exchange servers and database servers, Microsoft is working hard to making it better day by day and with the newer version 2019 we can failover to a cloud or on premises both.

At our organization, we use Windows Server Failover Clustering to keep our Azure DevOps Server environment in a high-availability state for our end users. Both the application tier and the SQL tier are clustered so that if there is a network fault or outage, the system will fail-over to the other server node, and the user can continue to work without knowing the server was down.

We use failover clustering to provide an active-passive failover for VMs hosted on 2 physical servers. The VMs server both are public-facing websites and our internal CRM so completely mission-critical to the entire business for continuity. This gives us the redundancy and the ability to keep things going when constantly updating windows! WFC has some very advanced features but our needs are fairly simple and this works really well for us.

We use Windows Server Failover Clustering for our Hyper-V environment to improve the availability of the VMs. The most important problem addressed by Failover Clustering is the reduction of the downtime for server maintenance. Standalone Hyper-V hypervisors tend to need a lot of downtime for Windows updates. The entire organization uses VMs running on top of the Failover Cluster. We use a hyper-converged solution with Failover Clustering to avoid the need to purchase expensive SANs, so the cost of improved uptime is relatively low.

We use Windows Server Failover Clustering for two primary reasons: high availability and simplification of performing systems maintenance. Our failover clustering allows critical applications to continue with only a minor interruption in service if a needed system resource fails. It also allows systems administrators to failover an application to a passive node in order to perform scheduled or un-scheduled maintenance on the other node, and then fail back if necessary, all with minimal interruption of critical business applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and BMC's Control-M Workload Automation.

We started using Failover Clustering a while ago with Windows 2008 Hyper-V. We had a lot of issues (Cluster crash) and upgraded to 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2, with the same issues. However, the cluster may not be a 100% stable, but it helps a lot regarding maintenance and upgrade. Instead of having to shutdown everything, we move the virtual machines from one host to another. When a VM job in the kernel, the full cluster goes down. We than started using Failover clustering for File Share and Scale-Out File-Share to host company files, and VMs (over SMB3). At some point we had one of the host that crashed, and when hard-rebooted, the other host when down because of the failover cluster. Also, when moving the FileShare roles from one host to the other, the disk 'time-out' for a while, that makes the file server very slow. It's not perfect, but it's very useful

Windows Server Failover Clustering is used on most of our production infrastructure. We use it for our General FS Storage, Scaleout FS Storage, and Hyper-V Clusters. Because it is used for our VM environment, it is used by the whole organization. It provide us High Availability on those services.