Dell AX4-5 - Manual (Page 19)

Preparing Your Systems for Clustering
19
Selecting a Domain Model
On a cluster running the Microsoft Windows operating system, all nodes
must belong to a common domain or directory model. The following
configurations are supported:
• It is recommended that all nodes of High Availability applications are
member systems in an Microsoft Active Directory
®
domain.
• All nodes are domain controllers in an Active Directory domain.
• At least one node is a domain controller in an Active Directory and the
remaining nodes are member systems.
NOTE:
If a node is configured as a domain controller, client system access to its
cluster resources can continue even if the node cannot contact other domain
controllers. However, domain controller functions can cause additional overhead,
such as log on, authentication, and replication traffic. If a node is not configured as
a domain controller and the node cannot contact a domain controller, the node
cannot authenticate client system requests.
Configuring Internal Drives in the Cluster Nodes
If your system uses a hardware-based RAID solution and you have added new
internal hard drives to your system or you are setting up the RAID configuration
for the first time, you must configure the RAID array using the RAID
controller’s BIOS configuration utility before installing the operating system.
For the best balance of fault tolerance and performance, use RAID 1. See the
RAID controller documentation for more information on RAID
configurations.
NOTE:
It is strongly recommended that you use hardware based RAID solution.
Alternately you can use the Microsoft Windows Disk Management tool to provide
software-based redundancy.