Let's get this party started. In this demonstration, we'll start with
cluster‑aware updating, and we'll look at failing over, failing back
workloads, and then we'll finish with a flourish by examining Windows
Admin Center cluster administration. It doesn't really matter what
machine we're on.
But as you can see from the title bar,
I am on mem1, one of my domain member servers.
This is a Windows Server 2022 box.
And let me start by opening up Server Manager. And
while we wait for it to initialize,
that's part of the deal, let's open up Tools and see if I can get to, yes,
indeed, we have Cluster‑Aware Updating. And this is
available because I have the failover cluster roles and
RSAT tools installed on this machine.
Let's start by connecting to my AZ‑801 cluster, and it gives us
some potentially scary, but not really scary information. This not
available is never a good thing to say to an administrator, but
that's just saying that we haven't run any cluster or updating jobs
on the cluster yet.
Let's go to Preview updates for this cluster, and then we can see
our available plugins. I'm going to select the
Microsoft.WindowsUpdatePlugin, and then we'll generate an update
preview list by clicking the appropriate button.
Not too much going on here.
It looks like both of my cluster nodes need the same
Microsoft Defender security intelligence update.
That's not too bad.
Now let's see. We can do an interactive apply updates to this cluster run,
we can create or modify an updating run profile,
we can generate a report on past cluster runs, as you can see here.
Not much to see, but once we have something, we can export it.
We can configure cluster self‑updating options, and then we
can analyze cluster updating readiness.
That's actually a really nice step 0.
I'm surprised that that option isn't at the top of the cluster actions list.
So it looks like I have a couple warnings here.
Oh, this last one is actually pretty important.
It says the CAU clustered role should be installed on the failover cluster
to enable self‑updating mode. That's really important, so let's do that
right now, Configure cluster self‑updating options.
And let's see here. It says that after we configure this mode,
we do not need to explicitly initiate update runs anymore.
They'll be initiated automatically on a schedule.
Now does it make sense that the cluster‑aware updating
feature is itself going to be highly available?
That's why we need to create a clustered role specifically for CAU. And
what's cool is that with just a couple clicks of the mouse,
we can instruct this wizard to create that role for us.
So let's add the CAU clustered role, click Next.
This is where we can specify our self‑updating metadata, as you can see, daily,
weekly or monthly cadence.
Here's where we can change just some properties and metadata. We don't need to
get to this level of granularity for the exam. Of course,
in the real world,
you want to go out into the docs and understand the
implication of all of these advanced options.
Additional options, not too much to choose from here.
Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates,
Confirmation,
Apply. And at this point, CAU is being made highly available in the
cluster, and every month on that schedule it will do its update
automatically. Now, you can always come back and rerun that wizard if you
decide later that you need to change your schedule. That's not a big
deal, okay? Let me bring up VS Code because I always like to show you
some of the PowerShell as well.
Let me right‑click my line 27 in my script file, and here is the collection of
commands that we have in that module. And then here on 29, this is how you
would configure the cluster role for the cluster.
This does basically the same thing that the wizard does where we're
instructing Windows PowerShell to create that highly available role for
CAU, and then we specify the meta or how we want the update to take place
based on these different parameters, and this is just basic PowerShell.
But if you're a beginner,
I want to throw in just a little bit of stuff from time to time.
As long as you've run update‑help to ensure that your workstation
does have the help files for these commands,
I would recommend you do something like get‑help,
Add‑CauClusterRole, and then throw in the ‑Examples switch parameter.
I use this all the time because it gives us a full run of examples.
And normally the way they're structured,
let me scroll up, they start with the simple case and
then they get gradually more complex.
So it looks like this first example similar to what I
have up in my script file here.
Let me see if there's anything different. Here,
we're passing in a ‑PostUpdateScript.
Let me see. What's the second one, ‑DaysOfWeek, Max, that's not too different.
Third one looks like it's quite a bit more complicated where
we're specifying specific plugins and locations to look for
updates in those custom plugins. Nice.
Yeah, so you can always learn a lot with the PowerShell help, for sure.
I'm going to apply updates to this cluster, and let's just install those
hotfixes right now. Let's click Next and then Update. Notice that it goes into
updating mode in the background, and we can close this.
So let's bring up our cluster manager. Whoops, wrong MMC console.
Now let's take a look. We've got our roles and our
nodes. Go to Nodes. And we also, frankly,
instead of just manually watching the nodes, we
always could go to Cluster Events. This is going to give us a nice filtered view.