To successfully install Cluster Service, you should have a thorough understanding of certain elements. This includes: hardware, security rights, software, configuration, automated deployment, installation verification, and points of failure. In the previous installment of this article, we looked at some of the hardware requirements that need to be considered. Now we’ll take a look at the network requirements and security rights.

Network Adapters
Each cluster members needs at least one PCI network adapter. The recommended configuration is to have two or more network adapters in each node. Using a single adapter per node creates a single point of failure.

If implementing two network adapters per cluster node, one adapter can be used to connect a node to the public network (client-to-cluster communication). The second adapter can be used to connect a cluster node to the private network (node-to-node communication).

TCP/IP is the only network protocol supported by Cluster Service. You will need to decide how the cluster members will be assigned IP addresses. This can be done dynamically using a DHCP server or statically. Keep in mind that if you decide to use DHCP to assign IP addresses to cluster nodes and the DHCP server goes offline, they will switch to Automatic Private IP Addressing.

Security Rights
Before installing Cluster Service, you must make sure that a domain account exists for the service to run under. Once the domain account is created, it must be granted specific user rights. This can be accomplished by making the service account a member of the Administrators group. This cluster service account also requires three other user rights that are not granted to the Administrators group. These user rights include:

• Log on as a service

• Lock pages in memory
• Act as part of the operating system

These three user rights do not need to be explicitly granted to the cluster service account. During the installation of Cluster Service, the user account is automatically assigned these user rights.

The next installment of this article will describe the various software requirements that must be met.

[tags]diana huggins,cluster service,windows 2000 advanced server,scsi,fiber channel[/tags]