Practitioner Level

Creating a Windows Server Failover Cluster with Windows Admin Center

1 hour

3 Learning Objectives

You are working on configuring your Windows Server environment for high availability. As part of the effort, you want to create a failover cluster between your application servers. You want to make sure that the application servers are configured properly so they can be added to a failover cluster. In order to do this, in this hands-on lab, you are going to be installing Windows Admin Center and using it to validate and create a failover cluster.

Learning Objectives

Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:

Configure the Active Directory Domain Services Environment

Install Active Directory Domain Services
- Download the installadds PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
Create the Domain Admin user
- Download the domainadmin PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
Join the server VMs to the domain
- Download the domainjoin PowerShell script from the GitHub repository

Install Windows Admin Center

Install Windows Admin Center on the gateway server
- Download the Windows Admin Center from the Windows Evaluation Center

Configure the Failover Cluster

Configure a failover cluster, adding server1 and server2 via their fully qualified domain names (FQDNs)
Perform cluster validation
Create the failover cluster

Additional Resources

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the following to use this hands-on lab:

Active Directory Domain Services
Windows Admin Center

Lab Setup

This lab will require the use of an Active Directory domain, so the first thing that will need to be done will be to configure the domain. Because this environment will be set up on Azure Virtual Machines, there will be a few Azure-specific steps that will need to be taken and will be delineated in the lab objectives.

Lab Files

The lab files needed for configuring the Active Directory Domain Services environment can be accessed via the GitHub repository for this lab.

The Windows Admin Center can be downloaded from the Microsoft Evaluation Center.

What are Hands-on Labs

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.

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