Microsoft Windows is consistently ranked as the top development platform for MySQL, based on surveys of the MySQL user community.

MySQL Enterprise Edition is certified and supported with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering (WSFC), enabling organizations to safely deploy business-critical applications demanding high levels of availability using Microsoft's native Windows clustering services.

The following figure illustrates the integration of MySQL with Windows Server Failover Clustering to provide a highly available service:

In this architecture, MySQL is deployed in an Active / Passive configuration. Failures of either MySQL or the underlying server are automatically detected and the MySQL instance is restarted on the Passive node. Applications accessing the database, as well as any MySQL replication slaves, can automatically reconnect to the new MySQL process using the same Virtual IP address once MySQL recovery has completed and it starts accepting connections.

MySQL with Windows Failover Clustering requires at least 2 servers within the cluster together with shared storage (for example, FC-AL SAN or iSCSI disks).

The MySQL binaries and data files are stored in the shared storage and Windows Failover Clustering ensures that only one of the cluster nodes will access those files at any point in time.

Clients connect to the MySQL service through a Virtual IP Address (VIP). In the event of failover they experience a brief loss of connection, but otherwise do not need to be aware that the failover has happened, other than to handle the failure of any transactions that were active when the failover occurred.

You can learn more about configuring MySQL with Windows Server Failover Clustering from the whitepaper posted here: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_windows_failover_clustering.php

For background and usage information about Windows Server Failover Clustering, see these pages on the Microsoft Technet site: