A server cluster in one where a set of servers and networked together to perform as a group appearing to the external sources as a single server. These basically help in improving the performance of the servers and also manage the crisis situations when one of the servers is down. While managing the failures of individual servers is the main purpose for the server cluster, there are other functions as well like load balancing, traffic management and grid computing.

If you are planning to host a server cluster, you will need to decide on the technology on which your cluster will run. While the majority of the servers in market are Linux based, Microsoft based Windows server clusters specialize in failover clustering. In fact, this is the only cluster server technology that windows based machines support. This will increase the cost of implementation as you will need to license Microsoft Windows Server technology software, but will provide an easy to use, robust solution.

To host your windows based server cluster, you will need to have all the individual servers running on the MS Windows Server Edition OS. Then you will need to use MS Windows Computer Cluster Server to configure the properties of the cluster. One of the main advantages of using windows based server hosting technology is the ease of configuration. It doesn’t require a lot of technical expertise for you to set up the cluster.

As I have mentioned before, Windows Server Cluster technology only caters to the failover clusters. Here are some options as to what and how to handle the failures in servers. If we say a server failed, it could be because of the Application service failure, hardware malfunction or failure or due to Site failure.

If the server fails due to application server failure, then it is due to the problem in the software and not because of any other generic issues. In such scenarios, all the resources that the failed server had are diverted to other nodes and the requests are also diverted to other nodes in the cluster.

If the server fails due to hardware problems, it means that one or more hardware components related to that server is not functioning properly. In such scenarios, all the requests of that server are diverted to other nodes in the cluster. Since the problem here is with the hardware, we cannot utilize any of the failed server’s resources.

Site failures are mostly seen multisite architecture. We are talking about multiple servers hosting the same web services nut catering to different requests. These are mostly location based servers. For instance, all the requests from a city are sent to server X. If the server X fails due to power outage or due to some other reason, then it is directed to server Y which is placed in some other location. While the servers X and Y are not placed in the same location, they still form a server cluster here.

With so many advantages for windows sever clusters, the only drawback is that it doesn’t support other server cluster models.