Clustering Server 2008 R2

NOTE: The Windows Clustering examples are provided as one option to take advantage of clustering. Depending on your utility's technology environment, there may be other options more suitable for your implementation. Contact Schneider Electric to discuss available options and to help you decide which technology makes the most sense for your utility.

Server clustering is not a required part of the Responder implementation. If you choose to implement server clustering, server clustering provides failover support for the Responder services and message queues. If one Responder server should fail, its workload is shifted to another server in the cluster without impacting Responder users.

The Responder server is installed as a virtual server. This enables the Responder services to failover to a different server should the physical server fail.

NOTE: For failover to work properly, all servers in the cluster must be configured identically, with Failover Cluster Manager installed on each server. Your cluster must have available unused storage to support clustering.

To support scaling-out across multiple servers, Responder uses a component called a Message Router to route messages from the client facing queues to the back-end Responder services (such as, Data Services and Prediction Services). The image below shows the Message Router component in a group (to allow for failover) forwarding messages to additional server machines that participate as active nodes in an active/active server cluster. If an active node failover occurs (in the responder business services cluster), the active node resources are transferred to another node.

NOTE: Only two nodes are shown in the active/active cluster, but Windows Server 2008 R2 supports up to sixteen nodes. This may vary for different operating system versions.

Only one Line Display Services per organization can be running at a time.

IMPORTANT: This may vary for different operating system versions. Query Services should not participate in the cluster. Running Query Services as a generic Windows Service resource under the cluster service is neither supported nor tested. Query Services were not designed to run as a cluster resource in Microsoft Cluster Server. However, the Query Services (Windows Service) can be installed and run on the cluster nodes (server machines). To provide high availability, Query Services can be run on multiple nodes as Responder services. Client applications already support the ability to choose among the available Query Service instances as well as handle when a new Query Service is brought online or becomes unavailable. To install and run Query Services on the cluster node in this way, you must remove the Query Services dependency on the Responder Windows Service.