Even with that little wrinkle, setting up the cluster seemed surprisingly straightforward -- most of it's done with a wizard. You've got MMC (Microsoft Management Console) (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/howto/mmcsteps.mspx) snap-ins to manage the cluster nodes and you're even using Active Directory to track them. All pretty basic for a skilled Windows admin.

Where it gets complex is when you actually put the cluster to use. Applications need to be tweaked in order to submit jobs to the cluster, although Microsoft was kind enough to put a command-line capability in here. Might make it a little easier to automate job submission via scripting for the ubergeeky. My guys got the cluster to compute specific problems of the deep, financial, Wall Street persuasion. By the time they got things running, I was pretty deep into Episode 6 of The IT Crowd (http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/I/itcrowd/).

My ADD aside, Compute Cluster Server 2003 really surprised us in terms of usability. I'd still experiment with the release candidate before purchasing the commercial version this summer, however. Make sure your applications can truly take advantage of the cluster before going whole hog on this, because the hardware requirements are going to be pricey.