A Preview of Windows Server 2008 MSMQ Clustering
A very user friendly administrator UI tool for creating, configuring and managing MSMQ Clusters
While this isn’t really a new MSMQ clustering feature, it’s worth being mentioned first. If you have used Win2k3 Cluster’s Cluster Admin UI, you will find the new and improved UI tool, which can be launched from Start->Administrative Tools->Failover Cluster Manager, a no-brainer.
When creating a MSMQ cluster virtual server, the UI will create the virtual server with the resource group, all the necessary resources in the group including IP address, disk, network name, MSMQ and MSMQ Triggers, and their default properties and dependencies automatically. It saves you all the steps you would have to do yourself in Win2k3 Cluster. Another cool thing is that the UI first checks if MSMQ and MSMQTriggers are installed on all the nodes before creating the virtual server; if not, it will stop and pop up an error.
No more downloading MMCV.exe for managing MSMQ virtual server
Instead, you will find a link on the Failover Cluster Management UI called “Manage MSMQ”, as shown the picture below.
If you click the link on the active node, you will get the MMC plugin with MSMQ folder under “Services and Applications”. You can view public, private, and system queues.
MSDTC goes Active/Active
What does this have to do with MSMQ clustering, you may ask? How about this: each MSMQ resource group can have its own DTC resource and you can make your MSMQ resource depend on the DTC resource. That means you can guarantee that the DTC resource will come online before the MSMQ resource when a failover occurs.
—Jenny Zhou
