Using Visual Studio 2008 and C#, I developed a windows service A and deployed it to two nodes of a windows server 2008 failover cluster. The service A is part of the failover cluster service, which means, when failover occurs at node1, the cluster service will failover the windows service A from node 1 to node 2.
One of the tasks implemented by the windows service A is to start, monitor or kill a process B. The process B is installed to the two nodes but is not part of the failover cluster service. When a failover occurs at node1, the cluster service does not failover the process B from node 1 to node 2, and the process B continues running at node1.
The requirement is: When failover occurs at node1, we want the process B running at node1 gets killed, but we do not want the process B be part of the failover cluster service.
The first idea that pops up immediately is to put some code in an event handler triggered by the failover in the windows service A. The failover effect to the windows service A is similar to using the task manager to kill the process of the windows service A, but there is no event in windows service that can be triggered by killing the process of the window service. The events related to terminating a windows service are OnStop and OnShutDown, but killing the process of windows service A triggers neither of them. The OnStop event can only be triggered by stopping the windows service using Services Control Manager or Services Management Console. Apparently, the first idea is not feasible.
The second idea that emerges is to put code into the OnStart event handler of the windows service A. When failover occurs at node 1, the windows service A is killed at node 1 and started at node 2. During the starting, the windows service A at node 2 kills the process B that is running at node 1. It is a workaround and works very well. The C# code implementation within the OnStart event handler is as following:
1. Capture server names of the two nodes from App.config
2. Determine server name of the remote node.
3. Kill the process B running on the remote node. Check here for sample code.