About Failover Clusters

A failover cluster is one of two types of clusters included as part of Windows Clustering. A failover cluster is characterized by highly available resources. The Failover Cluster API allows you to create and support robust, cluster-aware resources for the failover cluster environment.

The following sections describe failover cluster architecture and implementation.

Topic	Information
High Availability	Definition of high availability.
Failover Cluster Implementation	Overview of how a failover cluster operates.
Failover Cluster Software Components	Description of the software elements that implement failover clusters and a summary of the failover cluster API.
Cluster Objects	Description of the objects (hardware and software such as nodes and resources) managed by failover clusters.
Cluster Object Properties	Description of the properties that determine an object's identity and behavior in the cluster and of the structures that support these properties.

Note that the information in all of the sections listed above is also presented in the documentation included with the operating system. If you are already familiar with how a failover cluster operates, you might want to start with either the Failover Cluster API or the Cluster Automation Server.