Self Test

A Quick Answer Key follows the Self Test questions. For complete questions, answers, and explanations to the Self Test questions in this chapter as well as the other chapters in this book, see the Self Test Appendix.

Making Server Clustering Part of Your High-Availability Plan

1.	You have purchased a prepackaged solution that uses an eight-node majority node set (MNS) server cluster. Because you have so many nodes, you have decided to install three nodes in your Atlanta data center, three in your Denver data center, and the last two in your Seattle sales office. You notice fairly soon that the server cluster is experiencing some uptime issues. The nodes in your Atlanta data center seem to fail frequently during times of high WAN utilization. What is likely the problem? All nodes in an MNS server cluster must be in the same data center. The high WAN traffic is making the heartbeats take longer than 500 ms to get to all nodes and back. The nodes in Atlanta are failing, and an MNS server cluster can have two nodes fail before losing quorum and shutting down. The cluster cannot be in three geographic areas. An MNS server cluster can exist in a maximum of two geographic regions, and high-speed networks must connect the nodes in each region.
2.	Your data center experiences a power failure, bringing all of your systems down. When power is returned, a single quorum device server cluster you have in use will not start. You examine the event logs and find error messages stating that the quorum drive cannot be found, yet you are able to view the contents of the quorum drive in Windows Explorer. Research reveals that either the disk signature on the quorum drive or the Registry key containing the disk signature for the quorum drive has been corrupted. What steps should you take to recover from this problem? Evict all other nodes from the server cluster, repartition and reformat the quorum drive, and rejoin the other nodes to the server cluster. Do a restore of the quorum drive from tape. Change the location of the quorum resource to another drive, repartition and reformat the quorum drive, and move the quorum resource back to the original quorum drive. Shut down all nodes except one, perform an ASR restore on that node, and restart all the nodes.
3.	As a consultant, you have been called in to attempt to fix a high-availability configuration that is not performing as designed. Your client wanted to provide high availability for a high-traffic Web site. The client purchased a preconfigured, mid-range, two-node server cluster and implemented IIS on the nodes. Response time for serving Web pages is unacceptable, although there have been no incidents of the application failing over. What is the correct fix for this situation? More nodes need to be added to the server cluster. Increase the number of nodes until performance reaches an acceptable level. Add NLB to the server cluster to handle more requests from clients simultaneously. Convert the server cluster to an NLB cluster. Move the server cluster to high-end hardware to provide quicker response times.
4.	You have been asked to design a server cluster. The server cluster will start small, but it may expand as more applications are added and predicted growth is experienced. Your proposal is for two nodes, a shared storage device, Fibre Channel host bus adapters, and switches for connectivity. When you present your proposal to management, you are asked to justify the high cost of the Fibre Channel solution. What justification can you provide for implementing Fibre Channel? Fibre Channel supports more than two nodes, allowing for the predicted growth. Fibre Channel is the fastest connectivity solution and will therefore yield the highest performance. Fibre Channel easily expands to allow more storage to be added to support the future applications. All of the above.
5.	You are configuring a large, single quorum device server cluster consisting of eight nodes and a dozen shared storage cabinets with 30 logical drives among them. Because of the large number of logical drives, you are using mount points instead of drive letters on most of the drives. After running the Wizard to create your first node, you can see only the drives that have been assigned drive letters. How is this resolved? Install the second node, which will automatically create mount point resources. Manually create the disk resources after the first node is created. Reconfigure the shared storage to reduce the number of logical drives to less than 16. Temporarily assign drive letters to the mount point drives, and then remove the drive letters after the Wizard finishes installing the first node.
6.	You are configuring a two-node, single quorum device server cluster with a single public network interface and a single interconnect interface. The network interfaces and storage devices have been configured, and the interconnects on both nodes have been connected with a direct crossover Ethernet cable. The installation of the first node proceeds without incident, but when attempting to create the second node, the installation fails. The Wizard reports problems communicating with the first node over the interconnect. You have verified that the cables are functional and have been properly inserted into the connectors. What is the most likely problem? The interconnect adapters are configured for auto-negotiation or for different speed and duplex settings. The direct crossover cable method cannot be used with this cluster configuration. A second interconnect is required with this cluster configuration. A switch must be used to handle heartbeat traffic.
7.	You have installed a third-party backup agent on your nodes. The agent is supposed to listen for requests from its control server and send data to it during a backup. Despite this, your backups are failing. The application on the control server reports that it cannot communicate with the agent. You check the node and see that the agent is running properly. What is the most likely problem? The agent is not server cluster-compatible and cannot be used on a node. The control server is attempting to communicate with the agent over the interconnect network. There is a firewall between the control server and the node running the agent. The agent has configured itself to listen on the interconnect instead of the public network.
8.	You have created a small, two-node, single quorum device server cluster to act as a print server for several hundred printers. The shared storage is a 4GB drive. Because of the small size of the shared storage and the transient nature of the data, the print spool resource is on the quorum drive. The server cluster operates acceptably for a period of time, and then both nodes are taken down by a sudden power failure. When power is restored, the nodes boot, but the cluster service will not start. How do you fix this problem and prevent it from happening again? Delete the files under the spool directory, remove the spooler resource, add external storage, and re-create the spool on a different drive. You cannot resolve this issue. Once the quorum drive is filled, all nodes must be evicted and the server cluster re-created. Reformat the quorum drive and apply disk quotas to prevent the spooler from filling the drive again. Perform an ASR restore on the nodes.
9.	You are configuring a large, single quorum device server cluster consisting of eight nodes and a dozen shared storage cabinets with 30 logical drives among them. The storage cabinet that contains the quorum drive also contains eight other logical drives and is connected to the last port on your 32-port Fibre Channel switch. While running the Wizard to create your first node, you cannot see any of the drives in the quorum drive’s cabinet, including the quorum drive. Which of the following is a possible cause of the problem? The maximum number of logical drives recognizable in by a server cluster configuration has been exceeded. The cabinet containing the quorum drive is not properly connected or powered on. The cabinet containing the quorum drive must be relocated to a lower numbered Fibre Channel switch port. The maximum number of storage devices recognizable by a cluster has been exceeded.

Answers

1.	B
2.	D
3.	C
4.	D
5.	B
6.	A
7.	D
8.	A
9.	B

Making Network Load Balancing Part of Your High-Availability Plan

10.	You have installed an NLB cluster onto a 10/100 Mbps switch. Other devices, including some older 10 Mbps-only devices, are also attached to the switch. Your NLB hosts are configured for 100 Mbps and full duplex. Soon, you notice that communications with the 10 Mbps devices have failed. After troubleshooting, you discover that apparently the increased traffic on the switch is preventing the 10 Mbps devices from having sufficient bandwidth for reliable communications. What is the best fix for this problem? Change the operating mode of the NLB cluster to multicast and enable IGMP support. Relocate all of the NLB hosts to a different virtual LAN (VLAN). Relocate all of the 10 Mbps-only hosts to the same VLAN. Install a firewall between the NLB hosts and the 10 Mbps-only devices and filter all NLB-oriented traffic.
11.	You have configured an NLB cluster with 10 hosts. The default port rule has been changed from all possible ports to just port 80. No other port rules have been defined. You have configured each node with IIS and followed the appropriate procedures for installing and securing IIS. After clients begin using the cluster, you notice that clients requesting normal Web pages are being served equally across the cluster, but clients requesting secured Web pages (SSL) and FTP sessions are all going to the host with priority 1. What is the best way to resolve this issue and to balance the SSL and FTP requests? Do nothing. SSL and FTP traffic cannot be load-balanced. Split the NLB cluster into three clusters and serve the SSL and FTP sessions from different clusters. Add new port rules for the SSL and FTP traffic. Change the default port rule back to encompass all possible ports
12.	You are a consultant. You have been called in to troubleshoot a malfunctioning NLB cluster that serves IIS Web pages. The cluster in question consists of six hosts, but only four successfully join the cluster. Two of the hosts never successfully join. When the rest of the hosts are shut down and those two hosts are started up together, they successfully perform convergence and form a cluster. This two-host cluster, however, seems to favor certain types of incoming traffic on each host, rather than equally among the two hosts. What is the most likely reason for this behavior? The two malfunctioning hosts are configured with different cluster IP addresses and a different host name than the four correctly operating hosts. The two malfunctioning hosts are underpowered and cannot join the cluster due to poor performance. The two malfunctioning hosts are configured with different port rules than the four correctly operating hosts. The two malfunctioning hosts are configured with the same priority.
13.	You are a consultant. You have been called in to troubleshoot a malfunctioning NLB cluster that is supposed to serve Web pages with IIS. The cluster contains four hosts, but only one host at a time will successfully form the cluster. Clients appear to have no problems connecting to any of the single-host cluster configurations. What is the most likely cause of the problem? The hosts are configured with duplicate priorities. The hosts are configured with different port rules. The hosts are configured with different cluster IP addresses. The hosts are configured with duplicate cluster IP addresses.
14.	One of your hosts in multiple-host NLB cluster requires maintenance. The cluster is heavily used and central to the profitability of your company. You want to bring the node down for service in the least disruptive way. How should you accomplish this goal? Use the drainstop option on the host needing maintenance. Use the drainstop option on all the hosts in the cluster not needing maintenance. Use the suspend option on the host needing maintenance. Use the suspend option on all the hosts in the cluster not needing maintenance.
15.	You have been asked to develop a design for an NLB cluster for an IIS-based Web site. The specifications given to you state that the Web application will be using server-side cookies to keep track of a visitor’s session state. Which port-rule filtering mode should you configure to support the application? Single host Multiple host/Affinity: None Multiple host/Affinity: Single Multiple host/Affinity: Class C

Answers

10.	A
11.	C
12.	C
13.	A
14.	A
15.	C