Windows 2016 Fail-over Cluster - what's in the box

Good day All,

Welcome back!!! i was listening to Microsoft ignite recording on great features in the box coming in Windows 2016 Fail over cluster so i just captured it for people who don't have time to watch video but would like to keep apprised of what is going to come, here is the list

Note: All the points are captured from this video, if anyone interested i highly encourage to go over it

1.      Storage QoS added in Windows 2016

2.      Shared VHDX Integration

Guest Clusters can now resize Shared VHDX without downtime

Gust Clusters can now have Shared VHDX protected by Hyper-V

Replica for disaster recovery

Guest Clusters can now have host level backups in addition to guest level backups of Shared VHDX

3.       Evolving CSV Cache

4.       Diagnostic Improvements

Additional Validation tests to catch Active Directory configuration issues

Improved Network Name resource logging

Improved Validation times for both Storage and non-storage tests

Less noise logged to the cluster log to prevent wrapping

Additional data logged to cluster.log, header and mini-dump of log level 5 verbosity

5.       Reducing Dump Sizes

Active Memory Dump captures what is important with smaller file sizes

new alternative to a complete (Full) memory dump

Excludes memory allocated to virtual machines

Simplified debugging of Hyper-V systems with large amounts of RAM

6.      Zero Downtime debugging

Clustering will capture live dumps on failures

Live dumps are a mechanism to generate a memory dump for debugging without crashing the system

Capture debugging data without having to bug check nodes

Debugging data without downtime

Capture dumps across multiple machines in parallel to enable debugging the distributed system

Integrated with Windows Error Reporting to snapshot logs

7.       Thunderbolt Networking - for 2 Node cluster now you can use USB cable and plugin it and IP6 is auto configured, no configuration is required.

8.       VM Compute Resiliency

VMs continue to run even when a node falls out of cluster membership in the past if a node fails it will drain all the VM's on the node and restart on the another node in cluster so in 2016 cluster resiliency to transient failures like spanning tree protocol , network hiccups . or I/O failure on the SAN and it comes up

9.       VM Storage Resiliency

VM Stack quickly notified on failure

VM moved to Paused Critical state and will wait for storage to recover

Session state retained on recovery

10.   Quarantine of Flapping Nodes

Unhealthy nodes are quarantined and are no longer allowed to join the cluster

Prevents flapping nodes from negatively effecting the other nodes and ther overall cluster

Node is quarantined if it ungracefully leaves the cluster 3 times within an hour

VM's are gracefully live migrated once Node is quarantined

Nodes prevented from joining the cluster for 2 hours

11.   Simplified SMB Multi-Channel

12.   VM Start Ordering Improvements

13.   Domain ‘less  Workgroup Servers as Cluster

14.   Multi-domain Cluster

15.   Cloud Witness

      Stretched clusters without a 3rd site

Clusters without shared storage

16.   Site Awareness

Groups failover to a node within the same site, before failing to a node in a different site

VMs follow storage and are placed in same site where their associated storage resides

VM's will begin live migrating to the same site as their associated CSV after 1 minute

17.   VM Load Balancing

Earlier as part of VMM not in Box

Identifies idle nodes in a cluster and distributes VM's to utilize them

Utilization determined by VM memory & CPU  pressure

18.   Seamless Upgrades

Rolling upgrade from Windows 2012 R2 to Win 2016 that is mixed mode clusters like Windows 2012, Windows 2016 in a same cluster eccept few features will be turned off.

In-place upgrades of cluster nodes now possible

19.   End to End Multi-Site Clusters

End to end Windows Server disaster recovery solution

Volume level software replication between storage of any type workload

Synchronous replication

20.   Clusters without shared storage using Storage Spaces Direct.

DAS storage replicated across all nodes clusters with no shared storage!

Hyper converged - VM's on Space Direct Cluster


I don take any credit for it just captured the details for cluster fan's , hopefully it will be useful for someone until next one you all have good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!