Group and resource administration is the heart of what makes a cluster work for an organization and allows the cluster to scale to meet the organization’s needs. Without groups and resources, the cluster would not be able to do what it is meant to do - to keep the resources active for client use at all times.

Groups are sets of resources that belong to a single node. A group and all its resources can be owned by a single node only. The owner of a group is where the resources are currently active and running, if they are online.

For example, suppose Node A owns Group 1, and Group 1 contains the following resources: File Share, Physical Disk, Network name, and IP Address. If Node A fails due to a hardware failure, this will cause Group 1 to fail as a whole and be moved to Node B. Once on Node B, Group 1 and all its resources will be restarted. This allows the file share to be available to clients even while Node A is offline.

Once a groups fails, it will be moved to the other node in the cluster (in the case of a Datacenter Server, there can be other nodes of more than two nodes are set up). The group must be moved to another node as a whole, not in part. Individual resources cannot be moved, only the group and all its resources can be moved as a whole.

When adding a group to a node in a cluster, you must open the Cluster Administrator. To accomplish this, click Start, point to Programs, Administrative Tools, and click Cluster Administrator.

Once the console is open, you can add a new group by selecting File | New and then Group. The New Group Wizard will appear prompting you to enter a name for the group and an optional description. Click Next to proceed to the next screen.

The wizard will then prompt you for the Preferred Owners. These are the nodes that can be possible owners of the group and the order in which the ownership will pass from one node to another in the event of failure. You can add a node as a Preferred Owner by selecting a node from the Available Nodes list and clicking the Add button. The Move Up and Move Down buttons are used to reorder the Preferred Owners list. Click the Finish button to create the group.

At this point the group will be offline and must be brought online. You can bring a group online by right clicking the group and selecting the Bring Online Option. The group will not contain any resources. Adding resources to a group will be discussed later.

Tags: windows 2000, windows 2k, cluster node, advanced server cluster group, resource administration