I hear youyou want your SQL, DHCP, Hyper-V or other services to be highly available for your clients or your internal users. They can be if you create a Windows Failover Cluster and configure those services in the cluster. By doing that if one of the servers crashes the other(s) one will take over, and users will never even notice. There are two types of Failover Clusters: active/active and active/passive.

In the first one (active/active) all the applications or services running on the cluster can access the same resources at the same time, and in the second one the applications or services running on the cluster can access resources only from one node, the other one(s) is/are in stand-by in case the active node is fails. For now I just want to show you how to create an Active/Passive Windows Failover Cluster, as for the shared storage I will use iSCSI since I can’t get my hands on a SAN, here at home. The iSCSI target is from, which is more than enough to create and test your Windows cluster, so if you want to follow along a trial version is available for.

To run a Windows cluster an Active Directory domain needs to be present. For this guide all servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.

You need either Enterprise or Datacenter edition, because Standard edition does not support clustering. In the following table I wrote down the cluster nodes network configurations. Node1 Node2 Network 1 (LAN) – 192.168.50.10 Network 1 (LAN) – 192.168.50.11 Network 2 (iSCSI) – 10.0.0.10 Network 2 (iSCSI) – 10.0.0.11 Network 3 (Heartbeat) – 1.1.1.1 Network 3(Heartbeat) – 1.1.1.2 Domain member Domain member I added a separate network card just for the iSCSI traffic, because I don’t want that traffic to get on my LAN and “hurt” the switches. I recommend you do the same if you put this on a production environment, if not, your LAN will suffer. Usually the Register this connection’s addresses in DNS box should be disabled on the adapter protocol for the iSCSI and Heartbeat network, but since these networks are completely separated from the LAN it’s OK to leave the box enabled, they are not going to register anywhere. After you configured the IP addresses on every network adapter verify the order in which they are accessed.

Vengeance Sounds Pack. Feb 01, 2008 Various Whitepapers and Datasheets overviewing Windows Server 2008 Clustering. Windows Server 2008 has a lot of differences from its previous versions and one of them is the clustering feature. How do I go about building a clustered SQL Server.

Go to Network Connections click Advanced >Advanced Settings and make sure that your LAN connection is the first one. If not click the up or down arrow to move the connection on top of the list. This is the network clients will use to connect to the services offered by the cluster.