TrustRadius Insights for Windows Server Failover Clustering are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Flexibility in Maintenance Tasks: Users have expressed satisfaction with the ability to conduct maintenance and patching on the passive node without requiring database shutdown, thus minimizing operational downtime significantly. This feature enables them to keep their systems up-to-date and secure without disrupting critical operations, showcasing the product's adaptability to dynamic IT environments.
Automated Recovery Assistance: Several reviewers have highlighted the value of the automated recovery feature, which enables swift system recovery without the need for IT intervention in case of failures or disruptions. This functionality instills confidence in users by providing a reliable failover mechanism that ensures business continuity and minimizes potential data loss during unexpected events.
User-Friendly Interface and Robust Documentation: Customers appreciate the product's intuitive interface that allows for easy out-of-the-box usage. Additionally, they find the readily available documentation to be a valuable resource for reference and troubleshooting. The combination of a user-friendly design and comprehensive documentation streamlines adoption processes, empowers users to maximize product capabilities effectively, and reduces the learning curve associated with implementing new technologies within their organizations.
Windows Server Failover Clustering is used on most of our production infrastructure. We use it for our General FS Storage, Scaleout FS Storage, and Hyper-V Clusters.
Because it is used for our VM environment, it is used by the whole organization.
It provide us High Availability on those services.
Pros
Live Migration of VMs between hosts. If you have sufficient network bandwidth, it is fast and I never had a failed live migration break the VM or kill it. Worst case is the live migration will fail (not enough RAM for example) but the VM always stayed up.
Windows Server Failover Clustering enables Scaleout Storage, which is probably the coolest feature Microsoft has to offer at this moment. It gives you Active-Active SMB file shares which can now be used by most Microsoft Services like MS SQL, Hyper-V, etc. and clients if Windows 8+
Cluster Validation is really complete and easy to understand. The validation gives you comprehensive error messages that help to diagnose and fix rapidly to get your Failover Cluster running in no time.
Cons
Storage Pool / Virtual Disk management via the Failover cluster is confusing. You sometime needs to initiate the task from the Failover Cluster Manager (to have the right permissions) but it just use the new Server Manager Console. It is also possible to see information like number of columns of VD from the Failover Cluster Manager console, but you can't see the deduplication stats. It would be nice to at least have all the information available on both console or eliminate one of them.
General FS switchover between nodes is slow and creates timeout when switching nodes. Failover Cluster doesn't seem to manage VD ownership that well. I even had a case where the VD was locked by a shutdowned node (bluescreen) which brought the whole cluster down.
DLL locking also doesn't seem to be well handled. We had multiple cases where the Hyper-V cluster crashed because some waiting for restart updates locked dll.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for redundancy during Windows Updates, hardware maintenance, or any outage where you are present in case something goes wrong.
It is not well suited for redundancy during, power outage, bluescreen, hardware failures, etc. because I have seen Failover Cluster bring the whole cluster down on all those cases. It even causes more chances to bring down the services sometimes (dll locking, VD locking)