What have we learned in this lesson?
Well, I would say that for your AZ‑801 success,
I would recommend you spend more time on traditional Windows Server
failover clustering than Always On availability groups.
There is very likely, you'll see a little bit on Azure
Load Balancer, but you'll see many,
many questions dealing with things like Scale‑Out File
Server and highly available virtual machines and
cluster‑shared volumes and that kind of stuff.
I would also ask, this is more of an Azure architecture question,
but I would ask that if you're using VM failover clusters in Azure, ask
yourself why, given that Azure has a whole bunch of Platform as a Service
offerings like Azure SQL Database that go far beyond the capabilities of
Windows Server failover clustering. I found in my industry experience that
many businesses will default to an Infrastructure as a Service model. That
is to lift and shift their VM‑based workloads on‑prem into Azure virtual
machines. And then hopefully, they'll begin a migration into Platform as a
Service. So that's all well and good, but how do you actually do the work?
What if you have a planned maintenance event where you need to take a
cluster down, or what if a cluster goes down on, well,
what if a cluster node, let's say, not the whole cluster hopefully,
but what if a cluster node goes down unexpectedly?
How do we handle that? We might also have the question, well, we
learned a bit about cluster‑aware updating earlier,
what else is available in Windows Server in terms of rolling updates?
Those are all leading questions to our next module,
which is called Manage Failover Clustering. A very imaginative name.
I regret naming it that, but it's too late now.
Happy studying.
Thanks for your participation. I'll see you then.