Cluster Quickness

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.