Administering Distributed Transactions on Windows Server Clusters

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) transaction manager, the DTC proxy, and the Component Services snap-in are installed on each node of a failover cluster as part of Windows setup.

The Cluster Administrator tool in Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 provides additional support for adding and configuring an MS DTC resource on a failover cluster. In Windows 2000 Server, you ran the COM Cluster Wizard (Comclust.exe) on each node in a cluster to add an MS DTC resource to a cluster. However, running the wizard on each node can become unwieldy as the number of nodes in a cluster increases.

Cluster Administrator has the following advantages:

  • You can add an MS DTC resource to all cluster nodes from a single location, which eliminates the need to run Comclust.exe on every node in the cluster.

  • You can perform all configuration tasks for an MS DTC resource through a single tool instead of through multiple tools.

  • You can use the same user interface (UI) that you use to configure other cluster resources, such as Message Queuing or SQL Server database software.

  • MS DTC configuration information is propagated automatically to the new node when the cluster service starts on that node.

Note

When you set up the cluster node as a component load-balancing server and add an MS DTC resource to the cluster, it is still necessary to run Comclust.exe on that node. When you run Comclust.exe, you cannot choose a cluster group for the MS DTC resource that you want to add to the cluster. Instead, Comclust.exe finds the first cluster group that contains the correct resource dependencies, and then it assigns the MS DTC resource to that group. When you run Comclust.exe, you must run it on every node in the cluster.

This section includes the following tasks for administering MS DTC on a Windows server cluster: