Windows Server 8 Beta Failover Clustering Part 2

There were so many images that I decided to split this up over several posts. In Part 1, I got the Failover Cluster feature installed on my first server, and now I’m going to work through the Failover Cluster Management tool.

So, the interface doesn’t look any different. I was hoping for something that was part of the Dashboard.

So here is the wizard, it’s really almost identical to Windows 2008 R2, but what the heck.

I’ve selected both servers to be nodes in my new cluster.

Oh wait! I forgot to install the Failover Cluster feature on win8-hv2!

No worries, I got it covered, I can add that feature remotely from the dashboard. That option has to be one of the coolest one’s I’ve seen.

Needless to say the feature installed successfully and I’m able to proceed now.

None of the hardware I’m using is technically support by Microsoft but it’s Beta software so who cares right? Let’s see what the report says though.

Welcome to the Wizards, is it just me or are there more of them?

Lets run everything, I know it will have issues, as both machines are different and don’t have the same sets of software available.

Here we go…

That looks good!

OUCH! Well, win8-hv2 doesn’t actually have Hyper-V installed and since that was in the test, that’s where it failed.

The report confirms this. But again, thanks to being able to remotely install Roles and Features, I installed Hyper-V on the other server and re-ran the tests.

Much happier! For the record, there are several warnings.

• Hyper-V : The processors are different between the two machines.
• Network : I don’t have redundant network cards
• Storage : I don’t have any storage available suitable for some types of clustering, which could be an issue for Hyper-V (Clustered Shared Volumes)
• System Configuration : To be honest, I didn’t actually look at this, I was aware of the others so I assume there is something minor missing or different between the two nodes.

Here we go, this is good enough to move on to create the end-point for the cluster. This is one of the ways you’ll be able to manage it.

Here it is saying it’s going to steal some IP’s from my range

My cluster is forming!

I was successful! But there were warnings, basically it’s telling me I don’t have any sort of network storage to use for this cluster, of which we were already aware.

Huzzah! The one warning was from the cluster I built earlier with just the one node. Perhaps should have nuked the cluster log, oh well.