Now a stretch cluster is kind of a special case scenario.
The idea here is that you have multiple sites and you need to extend a
single cluster or stretch a cluster across those sites.
Now depending upon how you're connecting to Azure,
if you have an ExpressRoute or a site‑to‑site virtual private network,
you could stretch in a hybrid cloud.
But I've seen in industry more often it's physical site to physical
site. But as long as you have the bandwidth and capability to do this,
notice that what you've got physically is a separate shared storage
array in each site and you've configured storage replica to replicate
that storage to keep it in sync.
And then when we define the stretch cluster,
you'll see that we've got in this picture,
Node1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
They're all voting nodes in the same cluster.
And because of that storage replication,
we could, for example, failover that VM on Node2 to Node4.
So it just provides another layer of abstraction for high
availability with your cluster service.
What is the Windows Server failover cluster deployment process?
Well, you always want a plan.
You want to think about how many nodes you have now,
how many nodes you might have in the future,
your need for a witness.
What kind of roles are you planning to cluster?
What have you decided on at the storage layer?
Are you going to do a SAN, a Fibre Channel, iSCSI?
Or are you going to do a Storage Spaces Direct shared storage,
you know, those sorts of questions.
Then we install the appropriate server features on your
nodes that will participate on the cluster.
It's strongly recommended that you run the cluster validation wizard to
make sure that you don't have any blocking issues.
Then you create the cluster.
The cluster also has its own client access point,
so there'll be a virtual IP address and DNS name for the cluster itself.
You'll then want to configure your storage, however you're doing that.
This is your shared storage that's connected to all cluster nodes.
And then, lastly, you deploy the cluster roles and then monitor ongoing. So that's the high‑level view.