Ensuring the Availability of Applications and Services

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If you cannot afford the costs of lost productivity due to the interruption of a mission-critical application or service, or if applications or services in your organization carry fiduciary legal responsibilities, this is an essential planning chapter for you.

Specifically, this chapter will help system administrators determine if your systems require clustering and, if so, which clustering technology is most appropriate for the applications and services in your organization. The guidelines in this chapter will help you create a plan that makes mission-critical applications and services highly available to users under any circumstance.

In This Chapter

Making Applications and Services Highly Available

Overview of Windows Clustering

Determining Availability Strategies

Planning for Network Load Balancing

Planning for Cluster Service

Optimizing Your Clusters

Planning for Fault-Tolerant Disks

Testing Server Capacity

Planning a Cluster Backup and Recovery Strategy

Windows 2000 Cluster Planning Task List

Chapter Goals

This chapter will help you develop the following planning document:

  • Clustering Deployment Planning Worksheet

  • For more information about Microsoft® Windows® Clustering, see "Windows Clustering" in the Microsoft ®  Windows ®  2000 Server Resource Kit Distributed Systems Guide .

  • For more information about creating test plans, see "Building a Windows 2000 Test Lab" in this book.