How to enable an active/active file server cluster in windows 2008 r2 Enterprise

Question

I've just created a cluster for my file servers in Windows 2008 R2 Ent SP1 environment. The goal - an Active/Active cluster for web server data

How do I go about telling the cluster to be active for both nodes?
Do I have to tell the cluster to be active/active?

Here is a link to the instructions I followed when configuring the failover cluster. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182326(WS.10).aspx

So if anyone can help me to grasp the concept or maybe I'm way off and I need a node that is not active along with 2 active nodes to do this, I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

MS Clustering does not do what you think it does. For a single resource (like a file share, or a DNS name, or a SQL instance), it can only be active on one node in a cluster. In almost all cases, MS clustering is a failover solution, not for load-balancing.

Joe's on the ball - if you want a highly-available fileshare, use DFS and put the share on at least two servers. You can do this with MS clustering as well, but you'll have a momentary blip when a failover happens.