Mapping Your Deployment Goals to a Failover Cluster Design

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

After you finish reviewing the existing deployment goals for failover clusters and determine which goals are related to your specific deployment, you can map those goals to a failover cluster design. For more information about defining deployment goals for a failover cluster, see Appendix B: Identifying Availability Requirements for a Failover Cluster. For more information about predefined deployment goals for failover clusters, see Identifying Your Failover Cluster Deployment Goals.

Use the following table to determine which failover cluster design maps to the deployment goals that you have for failover clusters in your organization. This table refers only to the five primary failover cluster designs described in this guide. However, you can create a hybrid or custom failover cluster design by using a combination of the designs to meet the needs of your organization.

Failover cluster design Simplest design for providing availability High availability of multiple services or applications High availability plus disaster recovery

Design for a Clustered File or Print Server

Yes

No

No

Design for a Clustered Instance of a Service or Application

Yes

No

No

Design for a Failover Cluster in Which All Nodes Run Hyper-V

Yes

Yes

No

Design for a Failover Cluster with Multiple Services and Applications

No

Yes

No

Design for a Clustered Service or Application in a Multi-Site Failover Cluster

No

No

Yes

Additional references