All those in favor, signify by saying "aye."
If you've ever wondered about quorum and the quorum drive in Windows Clustering, think for a minute about what probably happens every week at your local Kiwanis meeting.
The rules of parliamentary procedure require that a predefined minimum number of people are present at any meeting for voting decisions to be made. Typically that minimum number is 50% plus one –- or a majority –- of the total members in the club. Without that minimum number of people in attendance, the group cannot make important voting decisions.
Ensuring a quorum in a Kiwanis meeting makes a lot of sense. Unless a sizeable enough group of members are present, it's too easy for a small group of people to make decisions that affect the club as a whole. The very same concept holds true with clustering in Microsoft Windows.
Windows clusters are designed to ensure high availability of critical network services. Services hosted atop a cluster, as we talked about in my last article on failover clustering, enjoy a set of benefits that tends to increase their uptime during certain events, such as hardware outages, software problems or patching. But since a cluster involves more than one computer system, there must be a sense of "agreement" by all of the systems involved if the cluster is to operate.
Your cluster's quorum drive is one of the resources with a vote in determining whether the cluster agrees that it is, indeed, a cluster. If there are not enough votes being cast within your Windows cluster, then the components that make up that cluster cannot recognize that they're actuall
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y part of a fully-functioning cluster. The result is that the entire cluster and all its hosted resources are forced to shut down. You can read more detailed information about how this process works in this Microsoft TechNet.
Like with the Kiwanis, there are multiple ways in which this quorum can be measured using Windows Server 2008. One club member can simply count the number of people present, or members can raise hands as a test vote. With the large number of people making up the United States legislature, quorum there is determined by each member punching a button to vote "present."
Clustering in Windows Server 2008 adds an architectural improvement over previous versions of Windows in that its quorum can be determined through multiple ways, with the mechanism of that count defined by the administrator. Which mechanism you use will depend on how you set up your server cluster, what you want to do with it and how many nodes there are.
Let's take a look at the four ways of determining quorum in Windows Server 2008:
The model you base your server cluster upon is usually set during your initial installation and configuration. In some cases, however, it is possible to change quorum models down the road. This may happen if you later change the number of nodes in the cluster or the desired workloads it supports. You can do this by right-clicking the cluster name in the Failover Cluster Management console and selecting More Actions → Configure Cluster Quorum Settings. As with any major midstream configuration shift, you'll want to test the change prior to its implementation.
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