Windows 2003 Cluster?

[spinjector]

Hi all,

Could any of you point me in the direction of a good place to learn/setup a Windows 2003 cluster?

Google gave me more than I needed, so I thought someone here might offer some suggestions.

We have a couple of database servers and a file server that I'd like to clusterize with less expensive hardware like one of these awesome buggers.

I figure three clusters with two nodes each should be sufficient, with two hot-standbys.

I see that my Windows 2003 Administrator Tools includes the Microsoft Cluster Manager. Is this ok for small-scale stuff? Or is there something better. (think cheap)

Thanks.

[allen2]

First, you need cluster friendly applications and shared storage at least to be able to use cluster. See there for more informations.

Clusters are made to avoid downtime but are a lot more hard to repair when something goes wrong.

If you're only looking for a solution to avoid hardware failures, you 'd be safer creating a farm for virtual machines with the physical machines you were planning to use as cluster with something like vsphere (the most reliable in my experience), hyper-v or xen.