FAILOVER CLUSTERING IN MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER 2012

Abstract

The article is all about failover clusters in Microsoft Windows Server 2012. Failover clusters called as well High-Availability Clusters creates a group of servers working together to provide high availability of provided by the cluster services and applications. Client devices see the cluster as a single system. Clusters of this type - in the family of Microsoft Windows Server - are based on element quorum. Quorum in failover clusters is considered as a parts of cluster witch has to be active to allow the cluster to work. Thanks to this each individual node of the cluster can check - by the single query - if the whole cluster can be active. In the MS Windows Server Environment component of a quorum may be for example: node, disk quorum, shared file quorum. The clusters models discussed in the article - provided by MS Windows Server 2012 - include: Node Majority, Node and Disk Majority, Node and File Share Majority and No Majority: Disk Only. The main purpose of the article is to compare the unavailability time of the services provided by these models of clustering in the case of cluster component failure.