Q. Is the DHCP client service required on my failover cluster nodes?

A. The failover cluster virtual adapter uses the DHCP client to auto-configure. If you disable the DHCP client service on the failover cluster nodes, you'll be unable to create a failover cluster and the process will hang when trying to validate the addition of the nodes to the cluster.

I've seen this problem at some larger companies, where the DHCP client is set to disabled via policy as part of the security guidelines.

Related Reading:

• Q. Can I use the Windows Server 2008 R2 PowerShell modules to manage a Server 2008 cluster? Can I run them on a Server 2008 server?
• Q. If I want to enable clustering on Hyper-V guest virtual machines (VMs), do I also have to enable clustering on the Hyper-V hosts?
• Q. How can I stop Chkdsk from running on a clustered disk?
• Q. How do I enable or disable Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) from PowerShell in Windows Server 2008 R2?