There has been a new development in Microsoft’s failover clustering technology so a short response to my earlier post the chicken or the egg of Microsoft clustering … well, it turns out to be the egg 🙂
The Egg of Columbus
The new 2012 failover clustering platform allows an existing cluster to boot without a domain controller present. This means that the first cluster node does not have to authenticate itself to AD and can start the cluster by trying to gain quorum.
As Microsoft states, Active Directory is still required to form the cluster and/or the add new nodes to the cluster. However, once it is formed, the dependency on AD is removed for the cluster to boot or for existing cluster nodes to join the cluster.
Awesome development for people like me who run their Domain Controllers on the cluster itself!