Windows 2003 clustering for file serving.

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Here is what I want. Two file servers powered on at the same time.
If one has a failure, if I need to patch it and reboot, or if I need
to take it down to add memory then I want this to be invisible to the
users.

Per
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/clustering.mspx
MSCS does exactly what I want;
"...If one of the nodes in a cluster becomes unavailable as a result
of failure or maintenance, another node immediately begins providing
service, a process known as failover. Users who are accessing the
service continue to access the service, and are unaware that it is now
being provided from a different server (node)..."

So I have two Dell Power Edge 2950's setup to access an iSCSI SANs
from EMC. I have Windows 2003 clustering turned on and a virtual
share of \\virtualserver\share which points to both two members of the
cluster.

The problem is that when I patched one of these servers and rebooted
it, the users with that drive up in explorer had explorer close on
them. Users saving data at that time got errors that the server was
unavailable. This lasted for about 10 seconds. Then they started
working again, on the other member of the cluster.

By anyone's definition, that is not transparent to the user. So
something is wrong.

So I start digging around and come across this;
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/clustering/sercsfaq.mspx#ERC

Which states;
" Is failover transparent to users? (Long paragraph, basically the
answer is NO."

So -- was I fooled? Does this mean that even in Clustering, I can not
expect 0 downtime for the users when I want to patch a member of the
cluster (for example.) Or do I have something setup wrong, and I
should expect 0 downtime?

Thank you;

Edwin.

.



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