A major obstacle to traditional clusters was the complexity in building, configuring, and managing the clusters. Too often this resulted in higher-than-necessary costs for organizations, both in lost opportunities to make more applications highly available and from retaining expensive administrative resources exclusively for maintaining the clusters that they did deploy.
A major facet of the improvements to failover clusters in Windows Server 2008 is aimed squarely at these challenges, producing a clustering paradigm that radically simplifies and streamlines the cluster creation, configuration, and management process.
Changes to clustering in the next iteration of the Windows Server operating system also improve cluster performance and flexibility. Clusters are x64-based and now support up to 16 nodes. Cluster nodes can have their IP addresses assigned by DHCP and geographically dispersed clusters can span subnets. Windows Server 2008 failover clusters are designed to work well with storage area networks (SANs), natively supporting the most commonly used SAN bus types. And Windows Server 2008 failover clusters are built around a more resilient and customizable quorum model.
This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.
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