Microsoft Cluster Server Logging Enhancements in Windows 2000

ID: Q234767

The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
  • Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

SUMMARY

This article describes the cluster logging enhancements in Windows 2000.


MORE INFORMATION

In Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, cluster logging has the following limitations:

  • To enable cluster logging, you must restart the computer. With larger systems, this can take an appreciable amount of time. This also leaves the system in a state in which there is a possibility of lost client access if the other node were to go down.


  • If logging had not been previously enabled, there is no way to enable it and process back to a problem. There would not be a history to any given problem.


  • Resources are referenced by their Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) instead of their friendly names, so reading the log is difficult and time consuming.


  • No reference to a date other than the day of the month makes matching up the event log entries to the cluster log cumbersome if the cluster has been up for more than a month.


  • Cluster logging resets itself when the service is restarted, so keeping a true history is not available.


Windows 2000 cluster logging addresses all of these limitations in the following ways:
  • You need only to restart the Cluster service on a node to enable logging, which takes significantly less time. There is a short period of time in which the cluster does not have failover, during which resources may stop working and manual intervention of recovery may be required.


  • Cluster logging is enabled by default, so all relevant information is logged the first time the Cluster service (Clussvc.exe) is started. It automatically starts logging information to the %SystemRoot%\Cluster\Cluster.log file.


  • Logs are more readable with friendly names. In other words, the log displays the resource and group name instead of the GUIDs. This makes it easier to determine the problem component without having to go to the cluster registry to decipher.


  • The cluster log references the month and year as well as the day of the week. This allows the log to keep a longer and clearer history of the cluster's health.


  • The cluster log, once enabled, grows to a static size of 8 MB (configurable in 1-MB increments) and clears events in a FIFO (first-in, first-out) sequence. The size is configurable with an environment variable, so you need to restart the Cluster service for changes to take effect.


Because the cluster log is enabled by default, you can change the system environment variables to change these logging properties if the location of the file needs to be changed or the size needs to be modified. Note that this requires the Cluster service to be stopped and restarted for the changes to take effect on the cluster node.

For additional information about these system environment variables, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q168801 How to Enable Cluster Logging in Microsoft Cluster Server

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbenv kbtool
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbinfo


Last Reviewed: December 30, 1999
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