I also want you to see that in Windows Admin Center in the global navigation,
we have the ability to browse our server connections
both on‑prem and cloud‑based hosts,
but we also have a separate node here for Cluster Manager,
and this is going to allow us to make a connection to the cluster
once it's created and do some basic management.
I do want to reiterate that concept that management here in Windows
Admin Center I think you'll find is pretty basic.
The great advantage of WAC is that it's a browser‑based
environment so you're not limited to a Windows environment like
you are with the Microsoft Management consoles.
On the other hand,
you'll find that there is not the surface area as it were in WAC
that you can find with those MMC consoles.
So it looks like we've got our cluster az801cluster,
and let's see here,
I can take a look now at the DNS Management console
now that I've installed that, and DNS is actually running on dc1.timw.info,
and if I go to my timw.info Forward Lookup Zone,
I've got a host record here for az801cluster with that static private address.
So far so good.
Now, nope,
I didn't install the graphical tools here for failover clustering so I
guess maybe we can try something different this time.
Again, I just want to go through these different admin tools.
As I said, I just want to show you,
even if we're driving by these different management tools because they do
come into play here as a hybrid cloud administrator.
So I'm going to step through here making sure to select mem1 in the server list.
And again, I want to go past roles into features,
and we're going to do Remote Server Administration Tools,
and I want to bring in here the Failover Cluster Management Tools.
I also will bring in the command interface while I'm at it.
Basically, I'm looking for the GUI console.
Alright, so that completed so let me open up Tools,
go to Failover Cluster Manager.
This is just an advertisement saying that we can do the same thing in WAC.
This is a tool you should absolutely master if you're going to work
with failover clusters in Windows Server for sure.
I just want to briefly walk you through the UI here.
We've got our root level cluster node which has just some quick links on it.
We've got our roles,
which is 0 right now because we haven't deployed any highly available roles.
If you right‑click and go to Configure Role,
you can see a list via this wizard of all of the possible
built‑in role types that are supported.
We have our nodes,
which allows you to see at a glance the availability of your nodes,
how many votes each one currently has,
and you can get to a lot of controls just via the right‑click,
the context menu, as you can see.
For our storage, we've got links to disks,
pools, and enclosures, this would be for our external SAN enclosures,
and then we have Storage Spaces Direct with storage pools and virtual disks.
Here we have our cluster network option here.
Take a look at our properties and this just shows
our different network connections,
particularly important if you have multiple path I/O.
And then we have a filtered view of event log here looking at cluster events.
Fortunately, there is nothing yet here, but it's a brand‑new cluster.
What are some other options?
Well, like I said, let's go back to the script file.
You can use the old cluster.exe command.
This is convenient, I suppose,
but it's not very useful in terms of it's all text‑based output,
it's not object based,
so you're not really going to have the notion of a
pipeline like you do with PowerShell.
Cluster/quorum gives you the current quorum configuration.
We just have simple node majority with no witness yet.
And then using PowerShell, using some of those cluster commands here,
we can run Get‑Cluster to get a list of all of the properties
that are currently set for that cluster.
We can again replicate the cluster/quorum with Get‑ClusterQuorum.
Let me just try running Get‑ClusterQuorum with nothing else.
Yeah, that's that output is not particularly useful.
And then with all things PowerShell, don't forget about Get‑Help.
I haven't updated my help yet so it won't return anything,
but if we were going to set cluster quorum programmatically,
we'd probably want the command Set‑ClusterQuorum,
and I find doing Get‑Help with the Examples switch parameter
is excellent because you can get some guidance and get
productive with the command immediately.
Alright, awesome.
Well, let's go back to WAC one more time.
We are going to be on Cluster Manager and let's go Cluster Connections,
Add, the name of the cluster is az801cluster.
I don't need to manage software‑defined networking
because I don't have that set up.
Also add server as well we already have,
so WAC should be smart enough to see that.
So now we have a separate entry for cluster connections,
so let's click into that cluster,
and what I want you to see is up here on this bar,
this is a great benefit that we don't have access to with the old MMC consoles.
I mean, other than something like Windows update or WSUS,
you might get an update that way.
But notice that WAC works on the basis of extension.
So Cluster Manager is actually an extension,
so that means that when the Microsoft engineers fix
bugs and add new capabilities, you can then update those extensions very easily,
just as easily actually,
as you would update extensions in your web browser itself or in
Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio itself.
Alright, I think that's all we need to do in this lesson, so we'll just call this demo done and continue.