It seems that the day of entering everything via DOS commands have come full circle as larger enterprise environments take advantage of high availability technologies like Windows Failover Clustering.
I was setting up a test environment today which consisted of eight nodes in a Windows 2008 Server Environment. The days of using the GUI and your mouse to click around get pretty annoying when you have to repetitively follow these processes across a number of servers.
Here are a couple of quick commands that can be used in setting up your clusters on Windows Server 2008.
Install the Failover Clustering role using the Server Manager Command Line:
C:\> servermanagercmd -install Failover-Clustering
Once you have installed the Failover Clustering role on all of your nodes, you can also automate the creation of the cluster itself from the command line. Specify a few parameters and you are set to go!
C:\> cluster.exe /cluster:newcluster /create /nodes:”ws08node1 ws08node2 ws08node3″ /ipaddress:192.168.1.10/255.255.255.0
Remember that after the cluster is created, you still have to setup your disks. This can also be done via command line, but In the case of this cluster, I prefer to do it in the Failover Clustering MMC. If you are adding a large amount of disks and want to automate that process, the cluster.exe command offers the functionality you need to accomplish that.
Once I had my disk provisioned, the process of installing the role and creating the new cluster (for eight nodes even) only takes a few minutes.