On the Summary page, you can select Create the cluster now usingthe validated nodes to continue on to create the cluster, rather thanclosing the wizard and reopening it. Adding a domain account as an administrator for the cluster enables you toperform actions on the cluster from tools such as Windows PowerShell. Add the cluster-admin domain account as a cluster admin. You have a two-node failover cluster, but the cluster uses a voting mechanism todecide which node should be active.
To achieve a quorum, you can add afile share witness. This tutorial simply adds a shared folder to the domain controller server. If this server were to go offline at the same time one of the cluster nodes isrestarting, the entire cluster could stop working because the remaining servercan't vote by itself. For this tutorial, the assumption is that the GCPinfrastructure features, such asLive Migrationandautomatic restart,provide enough reliability to keep the shared folder alive.
Your Windows Server failover cluster should now be working. You can testmanually moving cluster resources between your instances.
You're not done yet,but this is a good checkpoint to validate that everything you've done so far isworking. If this didn't work, review the previous steps and see if you missed anything. The most common issue is a missing firewall rule that isblocking access on the network.
Refer to theTroubleshootingsection for more issues to check. Otherwise, you can now move on to setting up the internal load balancer, whichis required in order to route network traffic to the current host server in thecluster. In Windows failover clustering, roles host clustered workloads. You can use arole to specify in the cluster the IP address that your application uses.
Forthis tutorial, you add a role for the test workload, which is the InternetInformation Services IIS web server, and assign an IP address to the role. Create and configure the internal load balancer, which is required in orderto route network traffic to the active cluster host node. You will use theGCP Console, because the user interface gives you a good view intohow internal load balancing is organized.
You will also create a Compute Engine instance group for each zonein the cluster, which the load balancer uses to manage the cluster nodes.
Create an instance group in each zone that containsa cluster node and then add each node to the instance group in its zone. Don't add the domain controller wsfc-dc to an instance group. Recall that the GCP internal load balancer uses a periodic health check todetermine the active node.
The health check pings the Compute Engine clusterhost agent that is running on the active cluster node. The health check payloadis the IP address of the application, which is represented by the clusteredrole. The agent responds with a value of 1 if the node is active or 0 if it isnot. The frontend configuration creates a forwarding rule that defines how the loadbalancer handles incoming requests.
For this tutorial, to keep it simple, youwill test the system by making requests between the VMs in the subnetwork. In your production system, you probably want to open the system up to externaltraffic, such as Internet traffic. To do this, you cancreate a bastion hostthat accepts external traffic and forwards it to your internal network. Using abastion host is not covered in this tutorial.
You might have noticed that the GCP Console notified you that thehealth-check system would require a firewall rule to enable the health checks toreach their targets. In this section, you set up the firewall rule. On each cluster node, wsfc-1 and wsfc-2 , create a firewall rule in theWindows firewall to allow the load balancer to access each Windows system.
On the Rule Type panel, select Custom as the rule type and click Next. On the Scope panel, under Which remote IP addresses does this ruleapply to :. On the Action panel, accept Allow the connection and click Next.
After your internal load balancer is running, you can inspect its status tovalidate that it can find a healthy instance, and then test failover again. In the Backend section of the summary, you should see the instancegroups listed.
Sometimes, you need to do at least one failoveraction to get the load balancer to find the IP address. In Failover Cluster Manager, expand the cluster name and click on Roles. This action moves therole to the other node, as shown in the Owner Node column.
Now that you have a cluster, you can set up yourapplication on each node and configure it for running in a clusteredenvironment. For this tutorial, you need to set up something that can demonstrate thatthe cluster is really working with the internal load balancer.
You are creating separateIIS instances that each serve a different web page. After a failover, the webserver serves its own content, not shared content. For example:. Now, when you view a web page served from one of these servers, the name of theserver appears as the title in the Internet Explorer tab. You see the Welcome page with the name of the current serverdisplayed in the tab title. Stop the current server to simulate a failure.
You should now see the name of the new active node displayed in the tab title. For example, if you started with wsfc-1 active, you now see wsfc-2 inthe title. If you don't see the change right away or see a page-not-found error,refresh the browser again. If the health check isn't working, double-check that you have a firewall rule toenable incoming traffic from the IP addresses that the health check system uses: Make sure port is open in Windows Firewall on each cluster node.
SeeOpen the Windows Firewall. It's important that each VM in the cluster has a static IP address. If you use network tags in your firewall rules, be sure the correct tags are seton every VM instance. This tutorial doesn't use tags, but if you've set them forsome other reason, they must be used consistently. To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud Platform account for the resources used in this tutorial:. After you've finished the failover clustering tutorial, you can clean up the resources that you created on GCP so they won't take up quota and you won't be billed for them in the future.
The following sections describe how to delete or turn off these resources. The easiest way to eliminate billing is to delete the project that you created for the tutorial. If you plan to explore multiple tutorials and quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits. If you need to keep your project, you can clean up the tutorial resourcesby deleting them individually.
Search for:. Setting Up and Configuring Failover Clustering. Getting Information About a Failover Cluster. Upgrading Windows Failover Cluster R2 to NOTE:Yes, you can have windows server and windows server R2 nodes participating in the same cluster. Configure Shared Storage: 2. Install the Hyper-V and Failover Clustering features on both physical computers: 3. Create the Cluster: In. This topic shows how to create a failover cluster on Windows Server by using either the Failover Cluster Manager snap-in.
Architecture This tutorial walks you through how to create an example failover cluster onCompute Engine. A second instance, configured to match the primary instance in zone b. Additionally, you deploy an AD domain contoller, which, for this tutorial,serves the following purposes: Provides a Windows domain.
Resolves hostnames to IP addresses. Hosts the file share witness that acts as a third 'vote' toachieve the required quorum for the cluster. The following diagram describes the architecture you deploy by following thistutorial. Shared storage options This tutorial does not cover setting up a file server for high-availabilityshared storage.
GCP supports multiple shared storage solutions that you canuse with Windows Server Failover Clustering, including: For information about other possible shared storage solutions, see: File servers on Compute Engine. Understanding the network routing When the cluster fails over, requests must go to the newly active node. Here's howinternal load balancing detects the correct node: Each VM instance runs a Compute Engine agent instance that providessupport for Windows failover clustering.
The agent keeps track of the IPaddresses for the VM instance. The load balancer's frontend provides the IP address for incoming trafficto the application. The load balancer's backend provides a health check. The health checkprocess periodically pings the agent on each cluster node by using thefixed IP address of the VM instance through a particular port. The defaultport is The health check includes the application's IP address as a payload inthe request.
If the agent finds a match, it responds with avalue of 1. Otherwise, it responds with 0. The load balancer marks any VM that passes the health check as healthy. What happens during a failover When a failover happens in the cluster, the following changes take place: Windows failover clustering changes the status of the active node to indicatethat it has failed.
Failover clustering moves any cluster resources and roles from the failingnode to the best node, as defined by the quorum. This action includes moving theassociated IP addresses. Failover clustering broadcasts ARP packets to notify hardware-based networkrouters that the IP addresses have moved. For this scenario, GCP networkingignores these packets.
After the move, the Compute Engine agent on the VM for the failing nodechanges its response to the health check from 1 to 0, because the VM no longerhosts the IP address specified in the request. The Compute Engine agent on the VM for the newly active node likewise changesits response to the health check from 0 to 1. The internal load balancer stops routing traffic to the failing node andinstead routes traffic to the newly active node.
Putting it together Now that you've reviewed some of the concepts, here are some details to noticeabout the architecture diagram: The Compute Engine agent for the VM named wsfc-2 is responding tothe health check with the value 1, indicating it is the active clusternode. For wsfc-1 , the response is 0. The load balancer is routing requests to wsfc-2 , as indicated by the arrow.
The load balancer and wsfc-2 both have the IP address Forthe load balancer, this is the specified frontend IP address. For the VM,it's the IP address of the application. The failover cluster sets this IPaddress on the currently active node. The failover cluster and wsfc-2 both have the IP address The VM has this IP address because it currently hosts the cluster resources. Advice for following this tutorial This tutorial has a lot of steps. Objectives Create a network. Install and configure Active Directory on a third instance ofWindows Server.
Set up the failover cluster, including a file share witness forthe quorum and a role for the workload. Set up the internal load balancer. Test the failover operation to verify that the cluster is working. See the Pricing Calculatorfor an estimate of the costs to complete this tutorial. Before you begin Sign in to your Google Account. If you don't already have one, sign up for a new account. Select or create a GCP project. Note : If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project.
After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project. Start an instance of Cloud Shell. Creating the network Your cluster requires a custom network. Create the network: The name of the network you created is wsfcnet. Create a subnetwork. Create firewall rules By default, your network is closed to external traffic.
Creating the servers Next, create the 3 servers. Use the gcloud command in Cloud Shell. Create the first cluster-node server Create a new Compute Engine instance. Configure the instance as follows: Name the instance wsfc Set the --zone flag to a convenient zone near you. For example, us-central1-a. Set the --machine-type flag to n1-standard Set the --image-project flag to windows-cloud.
Set the --image-family flag to windows Set the --can-ip-forward flag to enable IP forwarding. Set the --private-network-ip flag to Set the network to wsfcnet and the subnetwork to wsfcnetsub1. Set the --zone flag to a different zone than the zone that you usedfor the first server. For example, us-central1-b. Set the --zone flag to a different zone than the zones that you usedfor the other servers.
For example, us-central1-c. Generating passwords Go to the VM instances page. Click the name of the VM instance for which you need a new password. You can either: Use an existing client.
Use RDP to connect to wsfc-1 , wsfc-2 , and wsfc-dc ,and repeat the following steps for each instance: In Server Manager, in the left pane, select Local Server. Right-click Ethernet and select Properties. Select Use the following IP address. Enter the internal IP address that you assigned to the VM when youcreated it. For wsfc-1 , enter ' For wsfc-2 enter ' For wsfc-dc enter ' For Subnet mask , enter ' For Preferred DNS server , enter ' Close all the dialog boxes.
This is a good time to take snapshots of wsfc-1 and wsfc Setting up Active Directory Now, set up the domain controller. Use RDP to connect to the server named wsfc-dc. Using the Windows Computer Management desktop app, set a password for thelocal Administrator account.
Enable the local Administrator account. Select the DNS Server role check box. This step is not specified in theinstructions. Select the Restart the destination server automatically ifrequired check box. Promote the file server to a domain controller. This is a good time to take a snapshot of wsfc-dc.
Create the domain user account It can take some time for wsfc-dc to restart. Follow these steps: On the domain controller wsfc-dc click Start , and then type dsa to find and open the Active Directory Users and Computers app. Right-click WSFC. For the Full name and the User logon name , enter cluster-admin. Click Next. Enter and confirm a password for the user. Select password options in thedialog box.
For example, you can set the password to never expire. Confirm the settings and then click Finish. Make cluster-admin an administrator on wsfc-dc : Right-click cluster-admin and select Add to a group Type Administrators , and click OK. Click Change. Click OK. Provide the credentials for WSFC. TESTcluster-admin to join the domain. Close the dialog boxes and follow the prompts to restart the server.
Enter 'cluster-admin' and the click Check names. This is a good point to take snapshots of all three VMs. Setting up failover clustering Reserve an IP address for the cluster in Compute Engine When you create the failover cluster, you assign an IP address to create an administrative access point. Open a terminal on a host VM or open Cloud Shell. Reserve an IP address. For this tutorial, use Follow the steps in the Microsoft instructions below, with these additional notes: Install the Failover Clustering feature on wsfc-1 and wsfc Don't install the Failover Clustering feature on wsfc-dc.
Otherwise, you might encounter permissionsissues. It's a good idea to always run Failover Cluster Manager this way or toconnect to a server as cluster-admin to ensure you have the requiredpermissions. Add wsfc-1 and wsfc-2 to the cluster as nodes. Common issues you might encounter during cluster validation include: Only one network interface between replicas. You canignore this one, because it doesn't apply in a cloud-based setup.
Windows Updates not the same on both replicas. If youconfigured your Windows instances to apply updatesautomatically, one of the nodes mighthave applied updates that the other hasn't downloaded yet. You shouldkeep the servers in identical configurations. Pending reboot. You've made changes to one of the servers,and it needs a reboot to apply. Don't ignore this one. The servers do not all have the same domain role.
You canignore this one. It also allows you to suspend active downloads and resume downloads that have failed. Microsoft Download Manager is free and available for download now. Warning: This site requires the use of scripts, which your browser does not currently allow. See how to enable scripts. Select Language:. Choose the download you want. Download Summary:. Total Size: 0. Back Next. Microsoft recommends you install a download manager. Microsoft Download Manager.
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