Clustering in Windows Server 2008 has been radically redesigned to simplify and streamline cluster creation and administration. Rather than worrying about groups and dependencies, administrators can create an entire cluster in one seamless step via a wizard interface. All you have to do is supply a name for the cluster and the servers to be included in the cluster and the wizard takes care of the rest. You do not have to be a cluster specialist or have in-depth knowledge of failover clusters to successfully create and administer Windows Server 2008 failover clusters. This means a far better total cost of cluster ownership for you.
The goal of Windows Server 2008 failover clustering is to make it possible for the non-specialist to create a failover cluster that works. Organizations using previous versions of failover clustering often had staff dedicated to installation and management of failover clusters. This significantly increased the total cost of ownership (TCO) for failover cluster services. With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 failover clusters, even an IT generalist without any special training in failover cluster services will be able to create a server cluster and configure the cluster to host redundant services, and the configuration will work. This means a lower total cost of ownership for you.
You will not need an advanced degree to get failover clusters working. The main reason for this change is that the new administrative interface does the heavy lifting for you. In previous versions of failover clustering, you had to learn an unintuitive, cluster-centric vocabulary and then try to figure out what those words really meant. There is no need to learn the intricacies of cluster vocabulary with Windows Server 2008 failover clustering. Instead, configuration is task based. You are asked if you want to create a highly available file server, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) server, or other type of server and then the wizard walks you through the process.
Ease of use was the number one consideration for Windows Server 2008 clustering. However, there are a number of new features and technical improvements too. The remainder of this paper discusses these new features and improvements.
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