The first four installments in this series of articles provided an overview to virtual host clustering and described the requirements that must be met prior to implementation. The remaining installments will now focus on the installation process.

With Virtual Server Host Clustering, a virtual machine (VM) is set up as a resource group - specifically a physical disk resource - on a cluster node. Several steps need to be completed to successfully implement a virtual server host clustering solution. The high level steps include:

1. Set up your servers in a cluster configuration.
2. Install Virtual Server 2005 R2 on each cluster node.
3. Configure the disk resource and resource group
4. Configure a virtual network
5. Create a virtual machine
6. Complete the configuration
7. Create a generic script resource
8. Install a guest operating system

The remainder of this article will look at each of these steps in more detail and provide links to references for additional information.

The Virtual Server Host Clustering Step-by-Step Guide for Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides in-depth information for completing all the steps listed above.

Step 1 - Setting Up A Cluster
Cluster Service provides high availability by automatically detecting when an application or service fails and automatically restarting it one another cluster member. Downtime from failed applications and services can be as little as a few seconds and go unnoticed by users. Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter editions include Microsoft Cluster Service. This service needs to be installed on each node in your cluster if you want to take advantage of failover.

For detailed information on how to install Cluster Server, refer to the article entitled Guide to Creating and Configuring a Server Cluster under Windows Server 2003.

Be sure that you pay close attention to the prerequisites for Cluster Service because there are several hardware and software requirements that must be met.

Tags: active directory server, virtual server 2005 r2, clustering server