Dell CX4 manual Installation Overview

12Configure highly-available applications and services on your Failover Cluster. Depending on your configuration, this may also require providing additional LUNs to the cluster or creating new cluster resource groups. Test the failover capabilities of the new resources.

13Configure client systems to access the highly-available applications and services that are hosted on your failover cluster.

Installation Overview

Each node in your Dell Failover Cluster must be installed with the same release, edition, service pack, and processor architecture of the Windows Server operating system. For example, all nodes in your cluster may be configured with Windows Server 2003 R2, Enterprise x64 Edition. If the operating system varies among nodes, it is not possible to configure a Failover Cluster successfully. It is recommended to establish server roles prior to configuring a Failover Cluster, depending on the operating system configured on your cluster.

For a list of Dell PowerEdge Servers, Fibre Channel HBAs and switches, and recommended list of operating system variants, specific driver and firmware revisions, see the Dell Cluster Configuration Support Matrix on the Dell High Availability website at www.dell.com/ha.

For a general overview of cluster configuration tasks and more detailed information about deploying your cluster with Windows Server 2003 operating system, see the Dell Failover Clusters with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Installation and Troubleshooting Guide located on the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.

For more information on deploying your cluster with Windows Server 2008 operating systems, see the Dell Failover Clusters with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Installation and Troubleshooting Guide located on the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.

The following sub-sections describe steps that must be taken to enable communication between the cluster nodes and your shared Dell/EMC CX4-series Fibre Channel storage array, and to present disks from the storage array to the cluster.

Preparing Your Systems for Clustering

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