Clustering VMs
Because Windows Server is widely used in corporate and enterprise datacenters today, it's quite likely that you've been asked to create or support a Windows-based cluster. There are two primary ways to use clustering to provide high availability for Windows Server:
- Network Load Balancing (NLB) clustering
- Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC)
Although both of these methods are described as clustering, they each target very different purposes. NLB typically provides scalable performance, whereas WSFC usually focuses on providing redundancy and high availability in the form of active/passive workload clustering.
Some experts say that vSphere HA eliminates the need for WSFC because—as you'll see later in this chapter in the section “Implementing vSphere High Availability”—vSphere HA can provide failover in the event of a physical host failure. That's true, but it's important to understand that these high-availability...
