Installation and Troubleshooting Guide

46 Understanding Your Failover Cluster
File Share Resource Type
If you want to use your cluster solution as a high-availability file server, select
one of the following types of file share for your resource:
• Basic file share — Publishes a file folder to the network under a single
name.
• Share subdirectories
— Publishes several network names—one for each file
folder and all of its immediate subfolders. This method is an efficient way
to create large numbers of related file shares on a file server.
• Distributed File System (DFS) root
— Creates a resource that manages a
stand-alone DFS root. Fault-tolerant DFS roots cannot be managed by
this resource. A DFS root file share resource has required dependencies on
a network name and an IP address. The network name can be either the
cluster name or any other network name for a virtual server.
Configuring Active and Passive Cluster Nodes
Active nodes process application requests and provide client services. Passive
nodes are backup nodes that ensure that client applications and services are
available if a hardware or software failure occurs. Cluster configurations may
include both active and passive nodes.
NOTE: Passive nodes must be configured with appropriate processing power and
storage capacity to support the resources that are running on the active nodes.
Your cluster solution supports variations of active/active (active
x
) and
active/passive (active
x
/passive
x
) configurations. The variable x indicates the
number of nodes that are active or passive.
Cluster solutions running the Windows Server 2003 operating system can
support up to eight nodes in multiple configurations as shown in Table 4-6.
An active/active (active
x
) configuration contains virtual servers running
separate applications or services on each node. When an application is
running on node 1, the remaining node(s) do not have to wait for node 1 to
fail. Those node(s) can run their own cluster-aware applications (or another
instance of the same application) while providing failover for the resources on
node 1. For example, multiway failover is an active/active failover solution
because running applications from a failed node can migrate to multiple
active nodes in the cluster. However, you must ensure that adequate resources
are available on each node to handle the increased load if one node fails.