“Validate” in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering is your friend

Windows Server 2008 greatly simplifies the installation, configuration and management of Failover Clusters. It’s hard to believe, but the process to create a cluster becomes a simple wizard where you need to enter only the names of the servers (nodes) in the cluster and the cluster name (if you don’t use DHCP, you’ll need to provide an IP address). Truly amazing, if you consider that the Windows Server 2003 procedure required following the instructions on a white paper dozens of pages long. There’s a trick there, though, and it’s called “Validate”.

Clustering is no picnic

Installing a cluster is a complex task. Not only you typically are working with a group of high-end multi-homed servers with a sophisticated storage back-end, but you are also running important workloads like SQL Servers (more than half of clusters run databases), Exchange or vital File Shares. Of course these are very critical resources, or you wouldn’t be investing in making them highly available.

Planning and configuring a cluster is a challenge that is usually left to experienced professionals. In most places, there’s only a few people (if not only one person) that is allowed to even touch the cluster configuration. Even these experts follow that white paper carefully and double check every step.

Validation is the key change

With Windows Server 2008, that should change dramatically and an average Windows Server administrator will finally be able configure a cluster with no external help and without following steps on a white paper. You will still need to plan everything and understand how to install a group of servers, setup the network and manage the storage (or have people in your team that do), but the whole procedure will be a lot more forgiving.

One of the key changes is that you are now required to run a “Validate” process before you run the wizard to create a cluster. This tool was introduced as a download for Windows Server 2003 (look for "ClusPrep" at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/enterprise/clustering.mspx) and the version 2.0 of this tool is now simply part of the product in Windows Server 2008.

The validation process will check the many details and tell if anything is missing or configured improperly, pointing to the exact source of the issue. Validation will also do this for every server (node) of your future cluster, every network interface, every host bus adapter, every disk. It’s a thorough examination that includes simulating common cluster operations like contacting other nodes on every network interface or transferring control of a disk resource from one node to another.

Because validate is something you can perform multiple times, most of the stress is gone. Validate does not really configure anything, but it has to succeed before you create the cluster. So, by the time you need to actually do it, you already know it’s going to work.

The Validation Report

After you run validate, you’re given a report (in HTML) that diagnoses your system, indicating if there’s any trouble and exactly what that issue is. As I mentioned, you can run validate as many times as you need to get to desired result: a message that says “Testing has completed successfully and the configuration is suitable for clustering.” If don’t have a successful validation or if you deselect any of the tests, you’ll get a warning from the “Create a cluster” wizard saying your configuration is unsupported (and you wouldn’t want that).
 
Speaking of support, the report you get from validate is also a great tool to communicate with other groups (large companies typically delegate networking and storage to someone other than the server administration team), with the support staff from your hardware manufacturer and with Microsoft’s CSS (Customer Support Services). It’s also a great file to keep around as the documentation of your environment’s configuration.

By now you’re probably wondering what steps are included in the validation and what that report looks like. An actual report is too big to include here, but I got the titles for each portion of it, including the description of each one of the tests. Here it is:

Structure of a Validation Report

Conclusion

If you work with clusters and its many moving parts, you will eventually run into hardware and/or configuration issues. If you’re using Windows Server 2008 to run those, you might at times hate Validate for pointing out all your missteps :-). For instance, I copied some virtual machine configuration files once and this led to MAC address conflicts on my nodes. I just could not pass validation and got really mad at the tool. I eventually found a way to fix it...

In any case, you should never doubt that Validate is really your friend. After all, it will tell you about your mistakes and actually help you get through it. Isn’t that what real friends are supposed to do? And, best of all, Validate will be there to share the joy of confirming that everything is finally perfectly in place.

---

P.S.: If that got you interested in trying Failover Clustering for yourself, check this step-by-step guide at http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/adbf1eb3-a225-4344-9086-115a9389a2691033.mspx or use the Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering Virtual Lab at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032345932