Microsoft Clustering

Sean Roberts, Jean Pierre SLAC

Microsoft Clustering Terminology

Network Load Balancing Cluster (NLB) Component Load Balancing (CLB) Server Cluster Compute Cluster

Functionality of the different types of MS cluster solutions

NLB and CLB are stateless Ethernet based load balancing service, no additional hardware required Server Cluster is a fault tolerant stateful service, networked storage and dual NIC required Computer Cluster is a data compute service, at least dual NIC required

Overview of requirements and MS cluster products

Operating System of Nodes in Cluster Network Load Balancing Maximum Nodes in cluster Component Load Balancing (requires Windows Application Center 2000) Server Cluster Maximum Processors Per Node Intel Processor Class Supported (b) 32, 64 32, 64 32, 64 64 Maximum RAM (GB)

Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster

32 32 32 N/A

12 12 12 N/A

N/A 8 8 N/A

4 8 32 4

4 32 64 4

Network Load Balancing (NLB)

NLB has no status as it is stateless Web, Terminal, and VPN typical services run on NLB Interconnect by MAC address sharing Resources generally application being load balanced only

Component Load Balancing (CLB)

CLB has no status as it is stateless Web COM+ typical services run on CLB Using NLB as interconnect Resources generally COM+ application being load balanced only

Server Cluster
Cluster status held by quorum disk, generally a SAN device SQL, Exchange, File, and Print typical services run on cluster Interconnect by TCP and UDP on single network segment Resources generally SAN and NAS devices, IP addresses, hostnames, and applications

Compute Cluster
One or more head nodes must run Compute Cluster, remaining head and compute nodes can be Compute Cluster or Windows 2003 x64 Remote administration and job scheduling can be run from Windows 2003 or Windows XP Using MS-MPI supporting C, Fortran77, and Fortran90 (version of MPI2, compatible with MPICH implementation) Using PXE for deployment of nodes

Sharepoint NLB & Cluster Validation

Sharepoint web pages and configuration are pulled directly from SQL. All changes made from the application are seen immediately upon refresh of web pages Sharepoint runs on IIS and is a valid app for NLB (with server persistence set) Sharepoint runs on MS SQL which is a certified application that cooperatively works with the cluster service

Sharepoint High Availability Technologies Network Load Balancing used to keep the virtual web site available in the event of a web server failure Active/Passive SQL Cluster used to minimize service downtime in the event of a SQL server failure

Sharepoint NLB & Cluster Architecture

File Cluster Architecture

References

Network Load Balancing (NLB) FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2 Component Load Balancing (CLB) FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/acs/deploy/clbov MS Server Clusters FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2 MS Compute Cluster http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/hpc/whitepaper.