Building a Windows Server 2008 Cluster, Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, we prepared our Windows Server 2008 servers to be a part of a cluster. Part 2 showed us how we can add the shared disks, install the Failover Cluster Feature, and run the Validate Cluster Configuration Wizard. In this post, we will complete the process by creating a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

Creating the Windows Server 2008 cluster

Once you have managed to install the Failover Cluster Feature on both nodes, you can run the Failover Cluster Management console on either of the nodes. To do so:

1. Open the Failover Cluster Management console.
2. Under the Management section, click the Create a Cluster link. This will run the Create Cluster Wizard.
3. In the Select Servers dialog box, enter the hostnames of the nodes that you want to add as members of your cluster and click Next.
4. In the Access Point for Administering the Cluster dialog box, enter the hostname and IP address that you will use to administer the cluster and click Next.
5. In the Confirmation dialog box, click Next. This will configure Failover Clustering on both nodes of the cluster, add DNS and Active Directory entries for the cluster hostname.
6. In the Summary dialog box, verify that all the configurations are successful

A cluster in six easy steps! Microsoft has really made it this time, making sure that clustering with Windows Server 2008 is made simpler and easier to implement.

At this point, you can now validate whether your cluster is working or not. A simple test would be to do a continuous PING test on the IP address and/or hostname that you have assigned to your cluster. You can also restart one of the cluster nodes and see that the IP and hostname returns a reply, although you would see a 2-3 second glitch returning a Request timed out reply (which would also depend on your network latency) as the cluster fails over to the other node.

I hope you have enjoyed the series.