Yesterday I finished up my Professional SQL Server 2008 Administration book at long last, which makes my 9th book. I've never tried to write two books at the same time but I can tell you I'll never do it again! Writing is always like a bad hangover where you wake up the next day saying, "I will never, ever do that again" and then two weeks passes and you're back with a beer in front of you.

Regardless of the pain, I learned some interesting new things in this book. My most challenging adventure was to simulate a cluster on my laptop using Virtual PC. Previously I had always done Virtual Server but because of me being a stubborn guy, I really wanted to make Virtual PC work. To do this, I first had to find an ISCSI Target. The target's job is to host a shared drive that can be seen on multiple nodes and drive the failover. The software I found to be the easiest was Rocket Division's StarWind target software.

Once the ISCSI software was configured, Windows 2008 or Vista has a ISCSI initiator built into it. If you're running Windows 2003, you can download an ISCSI initiator for free. ISCSI initiators connect to the target and write data to the remote drive.

I will be creating a series of videos on the full clustering process on JumpstartTV.com later next week but let me tease this by saying that Windows 2008 clustering really is amazing. The process asked me two questions during the entire process and all nodes are done in one click without having to go to each node.

Watch this space for videos on the entire process.