| Original author(s) | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
| Operating system | Windows 2008 R2 / Windows 2008 / Windows 2003 R2 / Windows 2003 / Windows 2000/ Windows NT 4.0 |
| Type | Management Software |
| License | Part of Windows 2000/2003/2008 OS (Failover requires Enterprise or Datacentre) |
Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) is software designed to allow servers to work together as a computer cluster, to provide failover and increased availability of applications, or parallel calculating power in case of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters (as in supercomputing).
Microsoft has three technologies for clustering: Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS), Component Load Balancing (CLB) (part of Application Center 2000), and Network Load Balancing Services (NLB). In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 the MSCS service has been renamed to Windows Server Failover Clustering and the Component Load Balancing (CLB) feature has been deprecated.
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Cluster Server was codenamed "Wolfpack" during its development.[1] Windows NT Server 4.0, Enterprise Edition was the first version of Windows server to include the MSCS software. The software has since been updated with each new Enterprise Edition server release: Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, and many new features are included in Windows Server 2008[2]. The cluster software evaluates the resources of servers in the cluster and chooses which are used based on criteria set in the administration module. In June 2006 Microsoft also released Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003,[3] the first high-performance computing (HPC) cluster technology offering from Microsoft.