Determining server capacity requirements

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Determining server capacity requirements

After you determine the size of your cluster, you are ready to determine how individual cluster hosts should be configured. In general, this is based on the applications being load balanced and the anticipated client demand on those applications.

Some server applications (such as file and print servers) are extremely disk intensive and require very large disk capacities and fast I/O. Some applications (such as Microsoft Exchange) are CPU intensive and require very fast processers to work at maximum efficiency. Other applications (such as Microsoft SQL Server) require large amounts of memory. You should consult the documentation for each application that you will be running to determine how the servers in your cluster should be configured.

You should also bear in mind that while it might be possible to substitute two or three very powerful servers for a larger number of less powerful computers, deploying the larger number might actually be a better approach. With more servers, the client load can be more widely distributed, so that if one or more servers fail, the impact on clients is reduced.