Customer Reviews

Windows NT Microsoft Cluster Server (Network Professional's Library)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having 'played' around with MSCS for 1 year now on NT4 I'm still looking for good sources of reference for this technology, and unfortuneatly this is not it! In a lot of cases his explanations are very basic, and a lot of his examples don't make sense, and in some cases have serious errors. There is also far too much information that is not relevent to MSCS (have 32 pages of a registry dump with little explanation is not very useful!) After waiting months for this book to appear I was disappointed at the content, particularly when it turned up without the CD

I recently purchased the above book, somewhat in desperation, as I was detecting conflicting information regarding the installation and configuration of MS Cluster Server (MSCS.) Unfortunately, I made a poor choice in purchasing the book. What the author skimped on was the actual installation of MSCS.

While there isn't room to detail every omission here, the most serious of blunders occurs during his step by step install procedure where he mistakenly tells the reader that the MS Cluster installer is asking for the IP address of the NT workstation that will administer this cluster. This is in fact the IP address of the Cluster itself. This is a serious mistake and will result in the reader giving the IP address of another NT workstation to the Cluster which will ultimately cause an IP conflict.

Personally, I would recommend reading the MS documentation several times rather than this book

If you are currently running MSCS, you may find this book useful. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

This book is invaluable to me for it's section on troubleshooting. Believe me, when you have trouble with your cluster, this is likely the only place you will find an answer, or perhaps a glimmer of a clue, without calling Microsoft and getting their so called engineers (more like web-knowledge-base users) some more job security.

The section on clustering is good for a primer/refresher, and the installation section should ONLY be used as a guide in understanding why MSCS works. I would not recommend creating your first (or any) cluster with this section. You should KNOW how to create your cluster before doing so. DO NOT depend on a book to hold your hand on creating your cluster. LEARN this stuff any way you can, then when armed with sufficient understanding and skills, go for it.

I found the book to be of some use in my particular situation. It is a step above the manual that comes with the MSCS product. It has what I think is a serious error. Under "Mastering the Cluster Administrator", the author states that you can "Add or evict nodes from the cluster" with the Cluster Administrator. You can evict nodes, but you cannot add them back. You have to re-install the cluster software on the node to add it back to the cluster. Not fun. If you have no experience with MSCS this book can be of help.

Best MSCS Book on the market, even a little bit about SAP R/3 on MSCS

Anyone brave enough to install vers 1.0 of any Microsoft product understands the absence of substantial documentation/literature accompanying the release. Mr. Lee's book adeptly fills this gap. While his book is very much worth the purchase price, his postsale support has truly been appreciated !