Windows Clustering allows management of two or more servers as a single system. It also enables servers running DHCP to provide higher availability, easier manageability, and greater scalability.
Windows Clustering can automatically detect the failure of an application or server and quickly restart it on an alternate server. As a result, users experience only a momentary pause in service. With Windows Clustering, administrators can quickly inspect the status of all cluster resources and easily move workloads to different servers within the cluster, allowing manual load balancing and updates without taking important data and applications offline.
Windows Clustering enables the virtualization of DHCP servers so that if one of the clustered nodes becomes unavailable, the namespace and all of the services provided can reconstitute transparently to the alternate node. This behavior means no changes for the client, which sees the same IP address for the clustered DHCP server.
Without clustering, network administrators might split scopes between servers. If one server becomes unavailable, at least half of the available addresses remain available. Clustering makes more efficient use of IP addresses by removing the need to split scopes. A database stored on a remote disk tracks address assignment and other activity so that if the active cluster becomes unavailable, the second node becomes the DHCP server, with complete knowledge of previous assignments and access to the full scope of addresses. Only one node runs at any given time as a DHCP server; the Windows Clustering remotely stored database provides transparent transition when needed.
Because Windows Clustering works with all clustering-enabled Windows services, the same cluster servers used for DHCP can also support high availability for all other clustering-enabled Windows services.
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