I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten.

The initial setup takes a few hours and needs some knowledge to complete. You had to prepare hardware, do the prerequisites on the operation system, and install it.

I rate the initial setup a five out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The initial setup was easy for our first configuration but our second configuration made it more complex.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to deploy the service, to activate the service. Once you understand how it works, it'll be easy to configure any type of service that you want to create a cluster from. Some scenarios require a lot of work in order to create a cluster with assistance from Microsoft, meaning software or installation or configuration assistant, which makes things easy. Sometimes you need some steps that are not well explained. Meaning that sometimes you need to check or uncheck some option boxes, and you need to know what will happen if you check or uncheck these options and this type of misconfiguration or lack of documentation in the configuration process. Sometimes you lose all your data. This is just a technical thing, you will get it easily. This solution was designed first to create a file server for storage, to store files. So when you want to create a cluster and you need to choose or assign the servers you want to join or create clusters from them, you choose server one, server two, and server three. These three servers will be a part of the cluster. In one step, there is a check box. If you leave it checked, it will take all the disc space available on the servers and format direct. Meaning that if there is something that is hosted on these servers, they will be wiped out. Why? Because by default it'll configure these servers like file servers. It is important to know that if you have databases on these servers, everything will be lost. And this step is not well explained in the configuration process in the assistant. If you want to create a cluster, you need to start with freshly installed servers and not existing ones. The setup process is a bit confusing and on some steps, there is not much information about the next steps, and what will happen. Sometimes, normally and logically, you don't need to execute anything unless you click on the Finish button, not the Next button. With the configuration assistance of this solution, some action will be applied when you click on Next, even if it's not the last step.

Setup is straightforward. It is worth to plan it according to the product documentation. We do all installations in an automated way to gain reproducibility and speed up disaster recovery, which adds some complexity.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex.

I would rate Windows Server Failover Clustering's setup an eight out of ten. The whole deployment takes 10-20 minutes to complete. You need to monitor the solution and do a backup as part of its maintenance. This can be done by one person.