Think you're ready for a Microsoft Cluster Assessment? - Part 2

In part one, I discussed some of the technical things I learned from our latest Microsoft Cluster Assessment (http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/a/94adbabc-1e53-4a8e-abb5-34d3e31240e5/CSRAP.pdf). In the second part I am going to discuss some of the less tangible aspects of the assessment.
So Microsoft breaks it the operational aspects into three major categories

• Supportability and Best Practices
• Recovery Best Practices
• Nodes, Cluster and Site Recovery Procedures
• The bottom line of all these items: Documentation.

One of the things Microsoft stressed was a cluster build document for each type of cluster. In general we had always built clusters like IKEA furniture - i.e.

• Assemble component A (the operating system)
• Assemble component B (Windows Clustering ),
• Assemble component C (SQL )
• Combine them into one big happy set of clustered servers.

Microsoft recommends having end to end documentation for each type of cluster you build, rather than a modular documentation set.

There is also a heavy focus on Disaster Recovery, if you don't have any DR or BCM plans, prepare to see quite a bit of red on your final assessment.