Windows Server Failover Clustering Reviews & Insights

Score10 out of 10

39 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

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 Reviews

3 Reviews

Customer Service

Keeping It Up - Windows Server Failover Clustering for HA Applications

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Windows Server Failover Clustering for two primary reasons: high availability and simplification of performing systems maintenance. Our failover clustering allows critical applications to continue with only a minor interruption in service if a needed system resource fails. It also allows systems administrators to failover an application to a passive node in order to perform scheduled or un-scheduled maintenance on the other node, and then fail back if necessary, all with minimal interruption of critical business applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and BMC's Control-M Workload Automation.

Pros

Windows Failover Clustering is well suited to keeping critical applications online with only a brief outage in services during the actual failover. In some cases, it will disconnect user applications during the failover. That isn't a good thing, but better than taking the entire application down for a longer period of time to shutdown one server and bring another online.
Windows Failover Clustering can be easily configured to manage individual cluster resources. For example, we use BMC Control-M/Enterprise and Control-M Server. Our gateway resources for distributed systems and mainframe (z/Os), are managed well as individual resources within the cluster, allowing us to take a single resource offline when necessary, without having to take the entire cluster down.
When used in combination with Microsoft PowerShell (now also available to Linux systems), it provide tremendous ability to monitor, query, report, configure and deploy systems in high availability (HA) infrastructures.

Cons

The disconnection of services or users -- brief though it may be -- is a drawback to a seamless failover. The failover process is generally quick, and in many cases invisible to the business end user community, but with the variety of applications and how they interact with Windows Failover Clustering, sometime there is a brief outage (seconds) that does NOT go unnoticed.
Windows Server Failover Clustering in a Hyper-V environment can be a little tricky if the Hyper-V infrastructure is not properly configured at the cluster level for affinity. If you are considering using Windows Failover Clustering in combination with Hyper-V, be sure to set your affinity rules so that both nodes are never on the same host.
Error reporting is quite detailed, if you know where to look. What appears in the Critical Events list for a cluster, and even the Windows Event Logs can lead one to think that Microsoft overlooked that critical area. You have to dig deeper into the Windows logs -- not just the usual three of Application, System and Security -- to get meaningful and helpful detailed error data.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windows ServerFailover Clustering works very well for applications that can sustain a short disconnect when failing over. It works, and works well, in providing single-node applications HA, meaning an active/passive setup. It is not a load balancing solution. Use NLB for that. Another area that it works well is when used in combination with Hyper-V. We set our Hyper-V hosts up as clusters, and those clusters also host clusters for SQL Server and other enterprise class applications like BMC's Control-M/Enterprise and Control-M/Server.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (Logistics and Supply Chain company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Not the most stable, but so useful

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We started using Failover Clustering a while ago with Windows 2008 Hyper-V. We had a lot of issues (Cluster crash) and upgraded to 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2, with the same issues. However, the cluster may not be a 100% stable, but it helps a lot regarding maintenance and upgrade. Instead of having to shutdown everything, we move the virtual machines from one host to another. When a VM job in the kernel, the full cluster goes down. We than started using Failover clustering for File Share and Scale-Out File-Share to host company files, and VMs (over SMB3). At some point we had one of the host that crashed, and when hard-rebooted, the other host when down because of the failover cluster. Also, when moving the FileShare roles from one host to the other, the disk 'time-out' for a while, that makes the file server very slow. It's not perfect, but it's very useful

Pros

Maintenance - You can move all the roles to the other host, and update/upgrade without interruption.
Integrated - Based for many roles in Windows Server
Easy to use - Not many options, but easy to figure out

Cons

Limited - Not much you can configure or tweak
Unstable - Sometimes dies for no reason
Cluster Validation - It never goes right. Always a lot of errors

Likelihood to Recommend

This is very good to help your availability for your maintenance, but you should not based your full infrastructure on it. Make sure to backup, and monitor.

Tommy Boucher

IT Director in Information Technology at Coveo (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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What to know before implementing Failover Cluster

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 30, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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)

Marc-Olivier Turgeon-Ferland

It Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Coveo (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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