Microsoft Cluster Services provide redundancy for IP-enabled client and server applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and DNS.

On Windows 2003 hosts, the Server Manager uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for discovery and monitoring of the Microsoft Cluster Services. WMI is a proprietary Microsoft technology for modeling, querying, and managing configuration of Windows hosts. The Server Manager accesses this data by using a WMI Cluster Namespace, which is a streamlined method of data access.

Note:

Before using the cluster feature on Windows, you must configure WMI access, as described in “WMI Access Configuration” on page 315.