Microsoft Clustering Sean Roberts, Jean Pierre

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

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/windowsserver2003/library/ServerHelp/358b9815-3cd3-4912-a75a-cae85ea8d5ab.mspx

• Component Load Balancing (CLB) FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/acs/deploy/clbovrvw.mspx#EJAA

• MS Server Clusters FAQ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/clustering/sercsfaq.mspx#EQD

• MS Compute Cluster http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/hpc/whitepaper.mspx