Exchange Server 2003 cluster diagnostics

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Clusdiag is a free graphical cluster diagnostics and verification tool from Microsoft that can help you determine the health of your Windows/Exchange Server cluster. It can analyze an online cluster or cluster log file, and capture all event log entries and cluster log files from each node of a cluster.

All collected information is merged into a single log file and then displayed by Clusdiag for human reading. Built-in filtering capabilities allow you to find information more quickly. One of my favorite features is the ability to display a graphical report of the network and disk configuration.

Supported versions to install ClusDiag

Platforms on which ClusDiag can diagnose clusters

Download and installation

You can download Clusdiag here. After you download it, simply install the tool by answering some standard installation questions.

Using Clusdiag

For this article, I used a two-node Windows Server 2003 cluster with Exchange Server 2003 SP1.

Figure 1: Two-node Windows Server 2003 cluster with Exchange Server 2003
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Clusdiag uses two modes:

Figure 2: Clusdiag online or offline mode
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After connecting online to the cluster, you can start Clusdiag's discovery process.

Figure 3: Clusdiag captures log files
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Clusdiag contains a link to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Cluster Web site, where you can find much cluster information.

Figure 4: Link to the Windows Server 2003 Cluster Web site
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One of the great benefits of ClusDiag is the graphical presentation of the Cluster Resource Dependencies. With the help of this nice function, you

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can see the dependencies from each created resource. As you can see in Figure 5, the following components depend on the EVS-SA (System Attendant) resource:

You can see here that there are some changes to Windows Server 2000/Exchange 2000 clusters.

Figure 5: Graphical view of cluster resource dependencies
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ClusDiag creates several log files in the Clusdiag installation directory. For every node in the cluster, it creates a log file called Nodename_cluster.log, which contains very useful information about each cluster node.

Figure 6: ClusDiag log files
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If you want to run a test in Clusdiag's online mode, it requires that the following files are installed on the target node:

Reference Center: Exchange Server administration tools

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