Clustering on Microsoft Server 2008 R2

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Clustering on Microsoft Server 2008 R2

Window Server 2008 R2 is the best enterprise-class platform that allows processing any volumes of data in datacenters and provides high performance.

Windows Server 2008 R2 supports a number of new technologies that increase efficiency of clustering tools offered by Windows Server 2008.

Increased availability to the datacenters

The highest possible availability of systems and applications is one of the most important conditions of datacenter efficient operation. Virtual datacenter also require high availability, consolidation, and complex management tools.

Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 R2 supports Dynamic Migration that allows moving a virtual machine between virtual servers without cutting it off. During its move users connected to it will only notice short (during several seconds) performance degradation and won’t know that the VM has been moved to another physical machine.

Dynamic Migration supported by Cluster Shared Volumes

Along with Dynamic Migration, Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) are used in the Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters. Thanks to CSVs the same Logical Unit Number (LUN) can be addressed simultaneously by several nodes of a failover cluster.

Advantages offered by Cluster Shared Volumes can be used in various ways. For example, these volumes can be configured using NTFS which makes it possible to deploy CSV without reformatting Storage Area Networks and allows to present a SAN as a single data storage rather than the set of small storages. Thus, it is possible to avoid using of several network disks’ letters and to make the server cluster more easy-to-use. Moreover, no special configuration and management tools are required for operation with CSV; Windows Server administrators familiar with the built-in tools of Windows Server 2008, can go on using the same consoles for Cluster Shared Volumes and R2.

Increased fault tolerance of cluster nodes’ connections

CSV architecture ensures increased fault tolerance of cluster nodes’ connections thus influencing directly performance of virtual machines within a cluster. The CSV architecture has an I/O redirection function that allows to redirect the Input/Output operations within the failover cluster.

Improved cluster load balancing

Administrators can move the load from Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 cluster servers to Windows Server 2008 R2.

Windows Server 2008 R2 maintains all workloads supported by Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and can work with the most widely-spread network configurations.

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