Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Failover Clustering Cmdlets–Great Documentation

I just came across a really great page that documents the Failover Clustering Cmdlets in Windows Server 2008 R2. This page from Jose Barreto’s blog has a super diagram showing a model of these cmdlets. This model shows a box for each noun used by the cmdlets. Inside each box you see the the verbs that operate on the the noun, as well key attributes of a specific instance of that noun.  Thus for the Cluster noun, you see two identifiers (-ClusterName, –Properties) and the supported verbs (Get, New, Remove, Stop, Start, Test). Then you get links between the various objects showing how they relate to each other.  Then you get links between the nouns/objects. In other words - a good old fashioned data model.

For any cmdlet set, verb names are going to be constrained, e.g. get, set, new, start, stop, etc. So to learn a set of cmdlets, you need to focus on the nouns. Once you know the nouns, you will know the cmdlets (well for the most part). The diagram does a great job of showing how the the individual clustering objects (i.e. the nouns) relate to each other. What this diagram does so well is that it also shows the key objects involved in fail over clustering and how they relate since the cmdlet nouns are the key failover clustering objects.

Microsoft should document all cmdlet sets like this!

 

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