Windows 2000 Support for Clustered Network Shares

ID: Q238137

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

SUMMARY

This article describes resource-clustered share name support in Windows 2000.

MORE INFORMATION

With Microsoft Windows NT, you cannot create a new shared resource that has the same name as a shared resource that already exists on another Windows NT-based computer.

In an active/active cluster configuration, two nodes can own a shared disk independently of each other. For example, one node may own the share as drive X and one node owns the share as drive Y.

This is valid for clustering and can provide a certain amount of load balancing. For example, using clustering, you may configure half of your network printers to reside on one node, and then configure the remaining network printers to reside on another node in the cluster.

When a shared resource is added to a cluster, each node records the share in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CCU\Services\Lanmanserver\shares

Because this registry key is not replicated between computers in the cluster, it is possible for one computer to set up shares on two different nodes without error. When the Cluster Service processes a failover event, all shares within the cluster are combined and one share ceases to exist. For additional information about failover, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q197047 Failover/Failback Policies on Microsoft Cluster Server

Q171277 Microsoft Cluster Server Cluster Resource Failover Time

Q169414 Cluster Service May Stop After Failover

For additional information about clustering, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q175280 Information on Clustering Technology

Q171792 Using Microsoft Cluster Server to Create a Virtual Server

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbnetwork
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbinfo