Consolidating Servers as a Maintenance Task


Many maintenance tasks are performed on each server. Thus it stands to reason that reducing the number of servers will reduce the amount of necessary maintenance tasks . Similarly, older platforms often have more issues that must be dealt with manually and they are more prone to errors and failures. There are several technologies that can be leveraged to reduce the server count in the network.

Windows System Resource Manager

Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is an application that allows you to enforce resource allocation for a particular application. Memory and CPU usage can be given limits that the application is not allowed to surpass. In this way you can partition a server to handle multiple applications without concern of a single application taking up all the available system resources. This can be exceptionally helpful with systems that usually see a low load. By consolidating these small servers into a single larger server you can ensure that no one application will monopolize the server resources allowing them to coexist in harmony. Although Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is included in the retail versions of Windows Server 2003 and Enterprise Edition, it can be downloaded from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/downloads/wsrm.mspx.

Virtual Servers

Virtual machine technology is an excellent way to eliminate multiple legacy servers and consolidate them into a single server. This reduces the server count and in turn reduces the "per server" maintenance tasks. The side benefit is that you can eliminate legacy hardware and run the legacy applications on newer more supported hardware. A single server could literally run Windows 2003, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 9x, and flavors of Unix/Linux all at the same time.

Virtual servers talk to each other in the same manner real servers do. This means that applications that traditionally couldn't run on the same server system can now share hardware but still perform in their original manner. Mail servers and antivirus gateways are a common example of applications that traditionally had to be run and maintained separately. Through Virtual Machine technology they can share the same physical hardware.

This type of consolidation also makes it much easier to standardize on a single hardware platform. Reducing the number of platforms to support also helps to reduce the overall maintenance load. Hardware freed up in this manner can be redeployed into a lab environment for testing patches or new maintenance procedures.



Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Insider Solutions
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Insider Solutions
ISBN: 0672326094
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 325

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