Creating a Failover Cluster

This post is part of the Failover Cluster Checklist series.

Create cluster

Start the Create Cluster wizard from failover cluster manager or from the Validate Cluster wizard results page. First specify the servers that will be nodes in the cluster. Then, you need to supply a valid static IPv4 or IPv6 address and a Virtual Computer Name. The IP address has to be in a network that has access to a writable domain controller, and all nodes needs to have a NIC with an IP in this subnet. (unless you are creating a disjointed cluster with nodes in different subnets which makes everything more difficult and is not part of this post at this time)

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Set disk names

In Failover Cluster Manager, any shared storage will be listed as Cluster Disk 1, Cluster Disk 2 and so on

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You should change this name to reflect the volume name or drive name if you for some strange reason chose to have more than one volume per drive.

Set network names

Same goes for network names, Failover Clustering will just name them Network 1, Network 2 and so on. I like using Vlan numbers and functional tags like Public, Internal, Live Migration and so on. The important part is that you should instantaneously know what network is which. You should also define which networks are available for client connections. the cluster will assume that networks with a default gateway is client facing, while networks without a gateway is for internal use. If you use iSCSI, disable all cluster traffic on the iSCSI networks.

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Author: DizzyBadger

SQL Server DBA, Cluster expert, Principal Analyst

One thought on “Creating a Failover Cluster”

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