How to: Challenges
The most obvious challenge clustering presents is the increased complexity of installation and maintenance. An operating system, the application, and its dependencies must each be installed and updated on every node.

This becomes even more complicated if the nodes in the cluster are not homogeneous. Resource utilization for each node must also be closely monitored, and logs should be aggregated to ensure that the software is behaving correctly.

Additionally, storage becomes more difficult to manage, a shared storage device must prevent nodes from overwriting one another and distributed data stores have to be kept in sync.