Chapter 13. Clustering Services

   

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First designed for the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 operating system, server clusters and network load balancing clusters are substantially enhanced in Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition. They provide three principal advantages:

• Improved availability.

  By enabling services and applications to continue providing service during hardware or software component failure or during planned maintenance

• Increased scalability.

  By supporting servers that can be expanded with multiple processors (up to a maximum of 8 processors in Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, and 32 processors in the Datacenter Edition) and additional memory (up to a maximum of 8 gigabytes of random access memory in the Enterprise Edition and 64 GB in the Datacenter Edition) and by aggregating several servers into a single cluster platform for hosting applications

• Improved manageability.

  By enabling administrators to manage devices and resources within the entire cluster as if they were managing a single computer

By combining the Windows clustering technologies in an end-to-end solution, enterprise-class services that are highly scalable and highly available can be deployed on Windows operating systems.

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