Windows Failover Cluster Management Quick Overview

MCSA Exam: 70-740 & 70-741
Failover clustering - a Windows Server feature that enables you to group multiple servers together into a fault-tolerant cluster - provides new and improved features for software-defined datacenter customers and many other workloads running clusters on physical hardware or in virtual machines.

A failover cluster is a group of independent computers that work together to increase the availability and scalability of clustered roles (formerly called clustered applications and services). The clustered servers (called nodes) are connected by physical cables and by software. If one or more of the cluster nodes fail, other nodes begin to provide service (a process known as failover). In addition, the clustered roles are proactively monitored to verify that they are working properly. If they are not working, they are restarted or moved to another node.

Failover clusters also provide Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) functionality that provides a consistent, distributed namespace that clustered roles can use to access shared storage from all nodes. With the Failover Clustering feature, users experience a minimum of disruptions in service.

Failover Clustering has many practical applications, including:

Highly available or continuously available file share storage for applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Hyper-V virtual machines
Highly available clustered roles that run on physical servers or on virtual machines that are installed on servers running Hyper-V
What's new

Cluster operating system rolling upgrades
Enables an administrator to upgrade the operating system of the cluster nodes from without stopping the Hyper-V or the Scale-Out File Server workloads.

Cloud Witness for a Failover Cluster
A new type of quorum witness that leverages Microsoft Azure to help determine which cluster node should be considered authoritative if a node goes offline.

Health Service
Improves the day-to-day monitoring, operations, and maintenance experience of Storage Spaces Direct clusters.

Fault Domains
Enables you to define what fault domain to use with a Storage Spaces Direct cluster. A fault domain is a set of hardware that share a single point of failure, such as a server node, server chassis, or rack.

VM load balancing
Helps load be evenly distributed across nodes in a Failover Cluster by identifying busy nodes and live-migrating VMs on these nodes to less busy nodes.

Simplified SMB Multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks
Enables easier configuration of multiple network adapters in a cluster.

Planning
Failover Clustering Hardware Requirements and Storage Options
Validate Hardware for Failover Clustering
Network Recommendations for a Hyper-V Cluster
Deployment
Installing the Failover Clustering Feature and Tools
Validate Hardware for a Failover Cluster
Prestage Cluster Computer Objects in Active Directory Domain Services
Creating a Failover Cluster
Deploy Hyper-V over SMB
Deploy a Scale-Out File Server
iSCSI Target Block Storage, How To
Deploy an Active Directory Detached Cluster
Using Guest Clustering for High Availability
Deploy a Guest Cluster using a Shared Virtual Hard Disk
Building Your Cloud Infrastructure: Scenario Overview
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Operations
Configure and Manage the Quorum in a Failover Cluster
Use Cluster Shared Volumes in a Failover Cluster
Cluster-Aware Updating Overview
Windows IT Pro Support

[alexvasovic]

Great video.
I have a question we have 2 nodes each with same number of virtual drives attached to it C: D: W: (SQL Server installed on all 3 drives). When we run failover cluster creation it removed disks D: W: from both nodes? Any ideas why?

[kiransap]

Nice Topic

I have question for you.

We have fail over cluster in our PRD System and we have total 2 DB nodes but 1 year back we shutdown node 2 permanently and recently the node 1 is going offline frequently and we are unable to see entries in failover cluster and we need to restart the server to fixe the issue for temp...is there any solution to fix it

[ThePortugueseHandyGuy]

I have a cluster with 2 nodes, but if there is a power outage in one of them, the cluster service goes down. What am i doing wrong ?

[shahidvids]

Interesting video but sorry I cannot stand that background music. stopped video after 1 min of watching only because of background nuisance.