Server reliability is a very important item in today's computer-driven world. It seems that everything from the large plasma displays in Times Square to many automatic teller machines are driven by Windows- powered servers. Being able to keep your Windows Server 2003 solution up and running as much of the time as possible is not only expected, but demanded.
It's a fact of life, however, that nothing is ever perfect. Hardware fails, software stops functioning properly, systems become unavailable. In this chapter we examined an area of server reliability that most administrators have only heard about in passing: high availability solutions. Businesses want high availability servers to be up and operating 99.999% of the time; that's just more than 5 minutes a year of allowable downtime. For an ordinary server solution, having so little downtime would be impossible ; just applying regular hot fixes and service packs takes longer than this. However, by using network load balancing and MSCS clustering, you can create high availability server solutions from multiple servers. In the end, server reliability begins with you and your good planning. |