Diagram installation, establishment of a Windows Server 2012 failover Cluster

diagram installation, establishment of a Windows Server 2012 failover Cluster

Introduction: This article provides a detailed picture of how to install, verify, establish, configure, and test failover clusters in Windows Server 2012.

Key words: Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering

In this section, which focuses on the Windows Server 2012 failover cluster, failover clustering is a feature in Windows Server, and since the first time a cluster was introduced in Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition, can provide high availability for server load, is composed of a set of independent servers that collaborate to improve the availability of services and applications, when a failure occurs on one computer in the cluster, the resource is redirected to another computer in the cluster, and the workload is redistributed to another computer in the cluster. You can use failover clustering to ensure that users have almost always had access to important server-based resources. A failover cluster is designed for applications that have long-running in-memory state or have large, frequently updated data states. These applications are called state applications, and they include database applications and messaging applications. Typical uses for failover clustering include file servers, print servers, database servers, and messaging servers.
 
Although the failover clustering capabilities of older versions of Windows Server provide a robust foundation for implementing high-availability solutions, these features are greatly enhanced in Windows Server 2012 to provide higher scalability, faster failover, and greater implementation flexibility, and easier management. Better scalability than the failover group in Windows Server 2008 R2,windows Server 2012 includes:

1, create a cluster of up to 64 nodes, extend your environment, and the old version can contain only 16 nodes.

2. By extending the infrastructure, you can run up to 4,000 virtual machines per cluster, with up to 1,024 virtual machines per node.

3, with the control of virtual cluster management and other cluster role functions.

4. Support for extended file servers is increased compared to Windows Server 2008 R2.

5. Support for cluster aware update (CAU), Cluster Awareness Update (CAU) is an automated feature that allows updates to be automatically applied to host operating systems on a clustered server, and that the availability loss in the update process is minimal or zero

6. In a cluster running Windows Server 2012, an administrator can configure the services on a clustered virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 concurrently to monitor.

7. Microsoft ISCSI Software Target is an integrated feature in Windows Server 2012. It provides storage from the server over TCP/IP, including shared storage for applications hosted in a failover cluster. In Windows Server 2012, you can use the Failover Cluster Administrator or the Windows PowerShell cmdlet to configure a highly available iSCSI target server as a cluster role.

First.Installing a Failover cluster

Before you configure a failover cluster, to first determine that the servers in the cluster meet their minimum requirements, in a common deployment, a shared storage device that is compatible with the Cluster service role is prepared to hold the shared data required by the server node, regardless of whether the shared storage device being connected is a SAN or DAS, as long as a different LUN is used, Allows multiple cluster architectures to be accessed. It is recommended that you use NTFS-formatted partitions. If you are using a cluster shared volume (CSV), everyone's partition must be NTFS. If one server in the cluster fails, the other servers in the cluster take over and continue running immediately. These servers are detected through the heartbeat network, when the server fails, the other server will not detect the failure of the server heartbeat signal, this will be considered the server failure, and immediately take over and continue to run. You can connect to cluster nodes through multiple different networks. Alternatively, you can eliminate a single point of failure by building a network of your cluster nodes with group network adapters, redundant switches, redundant routers, or similar hardware. In addition to these, it is advisable to use a set of matching computers that contain the same or similar components.

Windows Server 2012 failover clustering can bring high availability to virtual machines and reduce the risk of virtual machine downtime, and below we will install failover clustering for 2 Windows Server 2012 and establish a failover cluster cluster:

1. By adding the Feature and Role Installation Wizard, select the failover cluster (pictured below) and click Next until the installation is complete and the system does not need to be restarted.

2. In Server Manager, click Tools, select Failover Cluster Manager in the menu that pops up, or select Failover Cluster Manager in the start interface.

  Second, verify failover configuration

1. After you open a failover cluster, you need to first complete the automatic configuration detection of all the cluster server computers before you formally establish the cluster, so that you can be more successful in the subsequent deployment of the entire cluster. Click Verify Configuration.

2, then "before the Start" interface, click "Next" button to continue

3. In the Select Server or cluster interface, either enter directly or click the Browse button to add all the servers you want to join the cluster, and then click the Next button.

4, in the Validation Configuration Wizard, it is best to choose to run all tests, all testing is to be able to view all the settings to establish a cluster between the server, including network, shared disk, operating system, and so on.

5, confirm the verification configuration.

6. Cluster validation has improved in Windows Server 2012, faster than older failover clusters.

7. After the test is completed, you will see the test results for each item in the summary, and if any of them fail, you can click the View Report button to see the reason for each failure and a clear description of the failure. In the default state, the report file is stored in Systemroot\cluster\reports in HTML format, and the date field time of the test is automatically marked on the report.

8, finally click to view the report, view the Complete test report page.

  Third. establishing a failover cluster

After all failover clusters are detected, the cluster host can be established. When setting up a cluster, be aware of the firewall settings, most of which are caused by a firewall. and ensure the security and reliability of network communication between nodes and storage.

1, in the interface before the start, click Next.

2. In the interface used to manage the access points of the cluster, you must enter a cluster name that does not currently exist, and the corresponding cluster IP address.

3, after the confirmation is correct, click "Next"

4, will start to create the cluster, you can view the verification process

5, in the summary, display the configuration completed and successfully created the cluster, you can click the View Report button to view a detailed list.

6, successfully create the cluster.

  Fourth. Configuring failover Cluster Roles

Windows Server failover clustering provides a critical technology for Hyper-V infrastructure, not only to provide availability, but also to provide portability. An important concept of virtualization and private cloud environments is to break the binding relationship between load and underlying physical resources, while failover clusters move and place virtual machines without downtime between different physical host hosts by using real-time migration technology. If a node encounters a failure, the virtual machine is dispersed to the other cluster nodes. In older versions of Windows Server, any resource can be dispersed to the cluster node that hosts the least number of virtual machines. In Windows Server 2012, this logic has been improved to determine how the virtual machines are dispersed based on the most common constraining resource of the host's memory. Each virtual machine can be placed in the node with the most free memory resources, and is evaluated for the resource requirements of each virtual machine.

Below we will configure Hyper-V in the failover cluster.

1. In failover Cluster Manager, right-click the role and select Configure role.

2, in the "before the Beginning" interface, click Next.

3, in the Select Role interface, select Virtual Machine, and then click the Next button.

4. In the Select Virtual Machine page, select the virtual machine for which you want to configure high availability, where all of the virtual machines in the cluster are displayed. When you click the Save button after the virtual machine is checked, setting virtual machine high availability will fail if the virtual machine is not in shared storage. Click the Next button.

5, confirm the selected virtual machine.

6. Configure high availability of virtual machines

7. In the "Summary" interface, the display has successfully configured high availability for this virtual machine, but the system also gives relevant warnings.

  Fifth. Testing failover Clusters

To make sure that the established virtual machine high availability runs in the Failover Clustering feature, you can then do some simple fault simulation tests. In order to achieve the best results, we will be one of the main machine, and this host running the virtual machine. First, we shut down the HYPER-V01 server, and in less than 10 seconds the failover cluster found the HYPER-V01 server that had been lost. However, the virtual machines on the HYPER-V01 are not connected.

The experiment was successfully followed by a failover cluster that automatically restarts the virtual machines on the hyper-v01 immediately on the hyper-v02 and restores the new virtual machines to normal.

A Windows Server 2012 failover cluster is introduced here. Original source: http://mabofeng.blog.51cto.com/2661587/1001507/