Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Cluster-Aware updating in Windows Server 2012 ("8)

It`s not new that Microsoft have made some significant improvements in the private cloud fabric recently, where you can integrate WSUS with System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager, so you can on-demand update your Hyper-V hosts and Hyper-V Clusters, in an automated fashion.

VMM will place the hosts (one at a time) in maintenance mode, live migrate the VMs to the other nodes, patch the node, eventually reboot the node and take it out of maintenance mode before it goes on with the next host.

So, this is brilliant. I can`t tell how many times I`ve done this manually prior to VMM 2012, when I rather should be home watching some random Barcelona match on TV.

So with Windows Server 2012 (yes- Windows Server “8” will be named Windows Server 2012), you have an inbuilt role for patching your failover cluster, that will work in a similar fashion.

Let`s take a look at the easy configuration for Cluster-Aware updates.



1.       Connect to your cluster that you want to enable for Cluster-aware updating. In my case, I have a cluster that hosts my highly available VMs, connected to a Windows Server 2012 iSCSI target.



2.       Click ‘Configure cluster self-updating options’ to configure this role



3.       You`ll be able to add the CAU clustered role if this is not already added on the server. Click next



4.       Configure the frequency of self-updating. I`m leaving it with the defaults in this case



5.       During the page for advanced options, you can use the settings based on a configuration you have created elsewhere (xml file) if you want the same options to be applied across your clusters, or specify new parameters in this view. I have enabled the ‘RequireAllNodesOnline’ and ‘MaxFailedNodes’ in this example



6.       Additional options lets you get recommended updates the same way that you receive important updates through Windows Update



7.       Confirm your choices, and if you scroll down you`ll see the PowerShell code workflow that will take place during completion.



8.       The Clustered Role is completed



Now, let`s wait for some new updates for Windows Server 2012 J


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