Microsoft Windows Cluster Services & Network Load Balancing
A collection of software, the Cluster Services provides automatic recovery from failure and an ability to move workloads for planned maintenance without downtime. It controls all aspects of cluster operations on a cluster system and has closely related, cooperating components:
- Node Manager handles cluster membership and watches the health of the other cluster systems.
- Configuration Database Manager maintains the cluster configuration database.
- Resource Manager/Failover Manager makes all resource/group management decisions and initiates appropriate actions, such as startup, restart and failover.
- Event Processor connects the components of the Cluster Service, handles common operations and controls Cluster Service initialization.
- Communications Manager manages communications with all other nodes of the cluster.
- Global Update manager provides a global update service used by other components within the Cluster Service.
- Resource Monitor, while not a part of the Cluster Service, communicates with the Cluster Service via Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). It monitors the health of each resource through callbacks to the resources.
- Time Service maintains consistent time within the cluster.
