In short, YES you should cluster the service if possible. I have seen lots of posts on this and I think that some recent problems with SSO clustering (see my post here for fixes) may have caused people to shy away from it. If you are running SQL on a cluster, then you may as well tack on another clustered service and have that much more protection. If you are not running SQL in a cluster then clustering the Master Secret Server will probably not make much of a difference for you!

I recently resolved this issue for a client but I suspect that many people have it due to some incorrect documentation regarding the installation of a clustered Master Secret Server. The Problem: SSO Master Secret server fails to start after failing over to second cluster node.

Now that notepad is 20+ years old I guess Microsoft decided to beef it up a little. XML Notepad 2007 is the new kid on the block and it is a nice little tool. I will probably keep on using XmlSpy and the BizTalk Editor for schema creation, but I'll give a go at using XML Notepad to create those pesky instance documents for test submissions to my orchestrations.