The following are best practices from this chapter:
Purchasing quality server and network hardware is a good start to building a fault-tolerant system, but the proper configuration of this hardware is equally important.
Create disk subsystem redundancy using RAID technologies.
Plan for a sufficient amount of TCP/IP addresses to support current and future cluster needs.
Do not run both MSCS and NLB on the same computer; it is unsupported by Microsoft because of potential hardware sharing conflicts between MSCS and NLB.
Active/Passive mode is easiest to manage and maintain, and the licensing costs are generally lower.
To avoid unwanted failover, power management should be disabled on each of the cluster nodes, both in the motherboard BIOS and in the power applet in the control panel of the operating system.
Carefully choose whether to use a shared disk or a non-shared approach to clustering.
Use multiple network cards in each node so that one card can be dedicated to internal cluster communication.
To reduce the chance of having a group failback to a node during regular business hours after a failure, configure the failback schedule to allow failback only during non-peak times.
Thoroughly test failover and failback mechanisms.
Do not change the cluster service account password using the Active Directory Users and Computers tool or the Windows security box if logged in with that account.
Perform ASR backups periodically and immediately following any hardware changes to a cluster node, including changes on a shared storage device or local disk configuration.
Create a port rule that allows only specific ports to the clustered IP address, and an additional rule blocking all other ports and ranges.
