Microsoft windows 2012 clustering

Question

I have 2 hardware servers with Microsoft windows server 2012 R2 standard. One of them is our production server and running on it our application. I was thinking to configure the second in a cluster to have a fail-over, but I need each server to work with it's own disks and have all data synchronized between these 2 servers. But windows clustering says that needs shared volumes, this is not an option to me because if main node goes down because of a power problem, on second node shared volumes will not be available.

So in fact I need a clone of the main server to the second in a cluster, such way if main goes down the second will be available.

Clustering is very good here, but I don't know how to synchronize disks between these 2 servers.

Is there any possibility to configure such an environment?

Answer 1

What you're looking for isn't what Windows Clustering was designed for.
Windows clustering is based on the notion of a shared SAN drive.

However you can look into active/passive load balancing, with disk mirroring.
ARR is a Microsoft solution for load balancing web applications.
As for the mirroring, you could use RoboCopy.

However keep in mind, there is a reason that you're coming across shared drives as a requisite for most clustering options. It is easier to set up than a mirror / load balancing solution, and most networks with availability concerns should be using SAN in stead of local drives anyways.