Chapter Summary

• Network Load Balancing and the Cluster Service both increase the availability of application services but in different ways.

• Network Load Balancing scales to 32 servers, and the Cluster Service scales to 8 servers.

• The Cluster Service requires two network adapters: one for the public network and one for private intra-node communication.

• Network Load Balancing does not require special hardware, whereas the Cluster Service requires an external shared disk resource for a multi-node cluster.

• A cluster service account should be configured prior to creating the cluster and granted the Exchange Full Administrator role after installing Exchange Server 2003.

• Exchange Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, is required for clustering.

• Typically, front-end cluster servers use Network Load Balancing, while back-end clusters use the Cluster Service.

• The recommended use of Exchange Server 2003 in a clustered environment is in an active/passive configuration.