How to Achieve Server’s High Availability using StarWind

StarWind iSCSI software represents one of the simplest tools available in the market to facilitate the use of high availability –clustering- for your servers and services, like a web server hosting your site, without the need of acquiring expensive and complex hardware to do it.

Achieving high availability for services in organizations it is not an easy task, decisions makers in several companies do not consider this solution as viable considering the costs we have to assume in storage and the new layer of complexity added to our platform. StarWind iSCSI software appears to solve both of these problems.

StarWind provides the possibility to use a simple server with normal hard drives to act as an iSCSI (open Internet protocol) portal which is charge of offering remote storage to machines and easily transform those in high availability clusters for your services.  Also, using Windows Server 2008 R2 we will see that the procedure to create a cluster if we are using StarWind iSCSI is really simple.

To create a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster using StarWind iSCSI software can be done within 5 steps (the complete guide available here):

1. Review requirements for the environment: Having one machine acting as an iSCSI server using StarWind software and at least to machines, same hardware baseline, to conform the cluster.
2. Install StarWind iSCSI SAN software: Easy step, just follow the wizard.
3. Configure and create storage within StarWind iSCSI: This application has a very intuitive console to administer the resources, so you won’t find much problem completing this.
4. Install Failover Cluster feature in machines and run validation wizard: The validation wizard will execute several tests to the servers in order to assure us that the cluster will be stable.
5. Create Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster: A three-step wizard that, if we executed the validation without any problem, this wizard should complete in the same way.

You can download a free trial for StarWind iSCSI software from this link.

Also there are more resources to take a look:

Five Easy Steps to Configure Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster using StarWind iSCSI SAN

StarWind iSCSI SAN: Quick Start Guide

iSCSI SAN Storage Videos and Webcasts

iSCSI Cluster Support: Frequently Asked Questions