07.1 Implementing Failover Clustering on Windows Server 2016 (Step by Step guide)

in a vacation but how to continue well on the topic of course failover quest ring hello friends this is nick from energy solutions and today i'm going to continue my hot topic on Windows Server 2016 with one of the interesting parts of the Windows server administration and configuration and this is the failover clustering as you all know fail request drink is not a new feature it's been around for ages now and it's pretty much still being used heavily in a lot of corporations a lot of big industries that want high availability and want their data to be preserved from any unexpected failures so this is a thing I just want to touch here in my next video of course this is going to be some high view touch of the failover clustering feature because failover clustering in general is a huge huge topic and 90 need to spend a lot of hours on this to try to explain to everyone but in general I just want to create a video where I want to show you how you can build a failover cluster that we are going to to make a share highly available and of course if the video is too long I will try to make it in two parts hopefully not and we can we can make it into a single video so on for this video I will need to have for running servers the first one is my domain controller that I'm going to be using for creating the cluster object and pretty much joining my member servers to mine domain of course I'm going to have a client machine that I'm going to test the functionality of the federal quarter of course I have a storage server and on this storage server I'm going to create the storage the shared storage that I'm going to present on my to notes because I'm going to build a two node failure cluster and just to make things simpler for you so you can monitor how things are going and keep track of things I've enabled the BG info on the top right side of the screen where you can if if you get confused you can just look into the hostname and an OB store 0 1 is my storage server of course n OB node 0 1 is my first note and n lb node 0 2 is my second note on my client virtual machine I've I did not add the BG info but this is going to be used only to test and confirm that the fell over cluster is working properly so if you were watching my previous videos I've configured the storage spaces feature on one of my storage servers in there I've configured a few few disks to make the storage pool and then make this storage blue highly available of course you can click back and just check the video as well but for this one I'm just going to proceed by installing the Icicle z target server role on this server of course you can combine the ayakashi target role with storage spaces so you can make your scuzzy targets highly available of course and fault tolerant but for this one I'm just going to start by installing the I scuzzy feature on my and I'll be store 0 1 and I'm going to add roles and features choose the storage server and if you click on the file and storage services expand the file and I scuzzy services and enable the Icicle the target server which should be enough for the purpose of this video so I'm going to install the role pause the video and continue when this is done now that the role successfully finished installing I'm going to close this window go to tools and or not the tools but on the left side file and storage services and go to ice cozy in there you have the option to create ice cozy virtual disks so I'm going to create a nice cozy virtual disc I'm going to select my C partition this is the only partition that they have but of course if you remember on the storage spaces you can create a storage pod and create the virtual disk on disparate storage pool and of course you can use this virtual disk to store your ice because it targets on it so I'm going to select this one and I'm going to name it this is the ice cozy virtual disk name and I'm going to name it I scuzzy disc one I'm going to click Next the size of the disc is going to be 5 gigabytes of course you have the option to create fixed size or a dynamically expanding code or differencing I'm going to just click six size and click Next here I will need to create the new iSCSI target and of course add the initially the initiator IDs so that the initiators which are going to be my note servers can connect to the size closet target so the Icicle the target is going to be named NLB store 0 1 like the name of the server and me here I need to add the ice cream Ishii ators these are the notes of my future failover cluster so what I'm going to do is you have several options you cannot add the computer names in here you can choose IQ and DNS names IP addresses MAC addresses I'm going to choose IP address because this is going to be easier for me so the first IP address for my first note is 10.0.0.0 I'm going to click OK and the second IP address is 10.0.0.0 ok so these are the two notes of my fail future failover cluster I'm going to click Next here you can configure authentication if you want for the initiators to make a secure connection to the Icicle the target I'm just going to leave this blank for now for this purpose here you have the summary in the confirmation of what you are going to come here so I'm going to create the disk and what I'm going to do next is I'm going to pause the video create two more disks with the same parameters and we can continue from there so we can keep this short just before I continue with the next steps of my video I just want to show you how you can configure the next ice-coated virtual disks you can see that I don't have to every time to choose the Icicle the target information instead I have this already saved and the only thing I need to do is just select this and click Next and then create the the disk that I want to configure and if you are wondering how the ice-cubes virtual disks looks like when I go to the I scuzzy disks you can see that it's a pretty much a hard disk image file and the hardest depending on watch configure tick size or dynamic size it will have the size that you specified so now that I already have my three on virtual I scuzzy disks what I need to do next is I need to connect these virtual disks to my notes which are going to become failover cluster and these are the disks that are going to be used as the storage the shared storage so the first thing I'm going to switch to my NLB node 0 1 keep track of the of the name and what I need to do is I need to go to my server manager let's minimize this and open tools iSCSI initiator and the first thing is going to say that the ice cozy service is not running so we need to start this click yes to this message and the small iSCSI initiator window should appear on your screen so on where you go and what you want to do here basically is you want to find and connect the I screw the target server that I've configured on my storage server so you have few options that you can configure this the first one is you can just add the IP address or the DNS name right here or go to the targets and just add the target name in here what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the discovery portal and we're going to specify the IP address of my storage server which is 10 to 0.02 and click OK and you can see straight away that is being added to the target portals so we're right now under the targets I have inactive the IQ n number of my storage number target which is the target that I've once you take the IceCube or two disks and connect the connect them to this server the next step that I want to do is I want to connect the the target and the initiator to the target and of course you have a lot of options right here I haven't configured the multipath but this is pretty much a good thing and with really great feature to have so you can have multiple paths to the storage so you can have better performance and redundancy if something happens but in the future I can make a video I think this is going to be a more advanced video on this topic so I'm going to click OK and now you can see that this is connected straightaway the same I'm going to repeat the steps on my NLB node 0 2 so I'm going to pause the video until this is done so you can see that I've already connected my node 0 chill to the iSCSI target that I've configured so the next thing I want to do is I'm going to switch to my first node I'm going to call this window for now I'm going to open Disk Management and in the disk management if I expand this you will see that I have available a tree of wine disks these are the disks that are store stores on my storage server so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring the disks online and I'm going to initialize them as a master boat but with Master Boot Record but of course you can initialize with GPT so okay so after this is done I'm going to configure a single volume on every single disk and I'm going to leave them or maybe label them with data leave the NTFS leave the default allocation size and click finish wait for the formatting to finish and make the second disk as well so I'm going to make this data to finish let's see what is making issues I guess I will need to wait for the formatting to finish properly before I continue with the next disk so yes day two three and finish so the three partitions are now available under my server I will just close this windows they are really annoying not sure why they are there so when I go to this PC you will see that I have the three volumes already configured and available on my note 1 server you can see right here so the next thing I want to do is I'm going to switch to my note 2 and instead of doing the same thing I'm just going to open the disk management and bring the disks online and not creating a volume of volume on them so I'm going to just expand this a bit and just bring them online the the console is not up to date so let me just refresh a lot of errors right here not sure what's going on but I I guess this is this is all KGC you can see right away that it's saying that there is a currently volume created on them so I'm just going to bring them online ok and you can see right here as well if I go to this PC the disks are available right now so there you go I've configured my shared storage so the next step that I want to do is I want to install the fell over clustering feature on both nodes to do this I'm going to click on add roles and features click on this one go to the features tab and select failover clustering add all the additional snap-ins and features and click install I'm going to switch to my second node and do the same here add roles and features next next of course you can view the installation remotely using PowerShell or using the server manager console it's up to you I have the the virtual machines right next to each other with RDP on them so it's really easy for me to install the feature separately so I'm going to double post video and when the failover clustering is finished we are going to proceed with creating the failover cluster so after a short break and the small cup of coffee my installation is finished and I can continue by closing this window and the next thing that I want to do is I'm going to open the failover cluster manager and in there the first thing that you want to do before building a cluster you need to validate the configuration of course this is an important step because if you have any errors you need to fix them before you create the cluster or after you create the poster if you validate the cluster and you have errors Microsoft are pretty much going to say that this is an unsupported configuration and they are going to refuse any system with your poster if you have any problems so the wizard I'm going to add my two nodes and and we note I'm going to add the two nodes for validation ok the two nodes are here I'm going to click Next and you can see that you have two options right here to run all tests which is recommended or run only test I select of course you can select to run tests for storage for networking a lot of things for you to do but I'm going to run all tests for now and this is going to show you the test that is going to perform and I'm going to click Next and the wizard is going to go through the cluster and check if my nodes are properly configured to for me to create the cluster so I'm going to pause the video and continue when this is done one other thing to mention during the tests I noticed and this is an important thing while the storage tests are going to run and after you've configured properly your favor cluster if you run test validation test from the cluster is going to take your disks offline so if you are doing this in production during business hours ding-ding-ding remember it's going to test the disk take the disks offline so you will have downtime so be prepared for that so now that my validation finished I'm going to see that I have some warnings I don't have any serious errors but there are warning presence present so if you click on view report it should generate a pretty much huge report describing every single problem and help you resolve it so you can see the warnings it's reachable from note but the only pair of network one pair of network interfaces this is a known warning for you users that you've worked with failover clustering you need to have two network cards in order for this warning to be passed successfully because one of the network cards should be dedicated for failover clustering and the other should be dedicated for your client taxes so in my case for these test purposes I only have one network card available on my notes so I'm going to skip this and this is going to be OK for testing purposes but if you are building this on production environment of course you need to to check this and fix this warning message of course there it is network configuration there is you can see it's going to advise you water the fixes that you need to do prior to configuring your cluster so remember Microsoft will not support configuration that is that has warnings through the validation and the first step that they want to see is this validation being passed before they even proceed checking your coastal configuration so I'm going to create the cluster using the create water wizard and to add my two notes 1 & 2 of course you saw on the validated validation page there was a tick box saying create a poster using D validated notes so you can go from there of course so the poster name I'm going to create NLB course 0 1 and on the network's you need to assign a network address for your cluster so for my cluster I'm going to specify the network address 200 because I know that this network address is currently available on my network so I'm going to click Next ok and I'm going to remove the tick box to add eligible storage to the cluster because I want to do this manually this is going to automatically add this developer storage and I don't want this to be the case in here so I'm going to click Next and it's going to start creating the cluster it's going to create the cluster virtual object in my active directory so I'm going to pause the video once again and continue when this is done so the wizard finished creating my cluster but with a warning saying that it was not able to find an appropriate disk to create a disk witness and of course if you are familiar with failover clustering you have different modes of terrible posturing witness only notes availability so you need to check and configure the proper witness for your environment is it a share witness or this witness in my case I'm just going to add a disk as a witness so we can keep myself or poster Inc up and running but there are multiple scenarios where you want to choose different options is it a note majority is it to share the witness so I'm going to click finish on this one now that the wizard is closed I'm going to proceed by opening the the tile on the left side and you can see that we have multiple things that we can configure with our failover cluster you can see that the the information about the poster you can validate the poster add notes configure rules and so on and so on the first thing that I want to do as I said I haven't added any discs to the failover cluster so if I go to disks you can see that I don't have any if I click on add disk you can manually configure the disks that you want you add to your failed or cluster of course for my purposes I have the three available disks that I can add so I'm going to add them but depending on your scenario you may need to deselect any of the disks maybe add one or two or depending on your scenario it can be different so I'm going to click OK and it's going to add the disks into the failover clustering manger console and they will be available for me to use so now that I have all of my cluster disks available and they are online as you can see what I need to do next is I need to add a role to my poster and this role is going to be the file server role that I've mentioned before because I want to make a highly available share what this means is that if a user for example is connected to the share and something happens to one of the nodes in my favor cluster configuration the other node will pick the share disks in the shares in general and there will be no downtime for the users that are using these shares which is a cool feature of course you can see that we have a lot of roles depending on your scenario you can configure DFS namespace DHCP server or virtual machine available cluster we can do this scene in the future of course but for this one I'm going to select the file server role in straightaway you can see that it's saying that I haven't installed the file services on this on my two nodes in general so what I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly install the roles and there then we can try again to consider the file server failure cluster so in order for me to install the file server I will open the server manager click manage next next select the first note click Next and open the file and storage services open the file and I scuzzy services select the file server and click Next Next and install I'm going to do the same on my second node from here as I mentioned before you can do this remotely to servers which is a great feature you can use PowerShell as well if you're ok with PowerShell so I'm going to select this feature click Next Next and install as well and I'm going to monitor the process and then try to add the file services role under my fellow / cluster now that in the installation finished successfully I'm going to close both windows return to my / cluster major and configure a role click Next file server this time I don't see the error message which is nice so I'm going to click Next and you can see that you have two options in there you have the option to create a file server for general use which you can configure which shares that users will access or you can configure the scale-out file server for application data and what this means is in the classic failover cluster model only one of the nodes can work to to provide access to your clients and this is normal behavior because one of the server's needs to have access to the storage and if both servers in the past of course if both servers were accessing the storage at the same time this year was known as a split blank brain situation and it was not a good behavior to see what Microsoft implemented in 2012 for I'm not sure if it's 2012 r2 is the scale file server which allows the two nodes to operate simultaneously and the client can connect with the two nodes available at the same time which is a great thing to see I'm going to choose the file server for general use this time and I'm going to click Next and I need to specify a name for the for the file server role that I'm going to install on my fellow / cluster so I'm going to specify NLB SS and I need to specify an IP address as well so I'm going to specify the address 220 and click Next and most of the people are when they are watching my videos they ask me where did I pick these addresses I have a network that I've designed for the testing environment and this network is the plain simple 24-bit you can see right here and the addresses that I'm choosing are random addresses that I know that are not being used by any other servers or applications or any other services in general so I'm going to click Next and in here you can see that I can select one of the three disks as a shared storage that is going to be made highly available so I'm going to select cluster disk 2 and I'm going to click Next and I can click Next and it's going to configure my file server to be highly available so I'm going to click finish to this wizard

Channel: NLB Solutions

Views: 186,186

Rating: 4.8579354 out of 5

Keywords: highly available shares, Windows Server 2016, file share highly available, Failover Cluster on Windows 2016, Failover Cluster, guide for failover clustering, Installation Storage and Compute with Windows Server 2016, 70740, 70-740, 20-740, Failover Clustering on file share, Windows Server 2016 shares, Step by step Failover Cluster

Id: NCRmenUXUv4

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2017