Hi,



Just wondering if anyone has any real-life experience with clustering. In doing my research I wonder if clustering offers any significant advantage in terms of auto fail over and restart of running applications. The application is SF/Vb.Net/SQL Server and if therefore "cluser unaware". As I understand it cluster unaware apps can be packaged into a container that the clustering software can communicate with to receive an "I'm alive" type of response. If there is no response then the application can be restarted on another node.



Assuming that this is roughly correct I'm wondering if clustering can work for us. In our case we have multiple instances of different exe's running concurrently but each is started with a different set of command line paramenters. So, from our perscpective, "ABC.exe para1=A, para2=B" is a completely different workload to "ABC.exe para1=X, para2=Y". Can this type of scenaria be handled when configuring cluster unaware exe's?





Cheers, Peter

I see that you are talking about EXEs. So are you running services? If you are talking about web applications then it is a totally different conversation. What are you trying to create in regards to a cluster? Do you have a process running that you have talking to another process (or service)? Is this a server application to which other clients are talking?

Hi Trent,



Our app isn't on the web. Everything runs under terminal services and we have a handfull of exe's that are launched using a central exe which determines who is logging in from where and starts the exe the user needs with appropriate parameters from a control table. In addition we have a few number of services that are are started at boot time and all interprocess communications is through the database.



Since posting here I have also been getting very good assistance from the Clustering Forum on MSDN and now know quite a bit more. Anyone looking at this post and is new to clustering may find this link of interest:



http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverClustering/thread/a316c935-3977-477f-ad38-4516a0bd5f5a



Cheers, Peter

Yeah, it looks like you are getting some good ideas from that thread. Good luck!