Building High Availability Windows Server 2003 Solutions Building High Availability Windows Server 2003 Solutions Preface The year 2004 will long be remembered as the year that saw the beginning of a huge push by companies and government organizations to once and for all migrate to a Windows Server operating system underpinned by Active Directory and Windows Server 2003. What is also significant about this year is that it will be remembered as the year Microsoft finally ended all support for Windows NT 4.0, the grandfather of the current version of Windows Server that many IT professionals now regard as the Serengeti of the operating system jungle. In 2004, many companies have finally made the move to ditch Novell NetWare. However, it is not simply enough to trade one operating system for another. Many IT shops going to Windows Server 2003 need to install and configure high availability, high-performance Windows Server 2003 systems that can service their needs day in, day out, 365 days a year. At the same time, they are also striving to lower the cost of installing, operating, and maintaining these systems and the overall cost of ownership TCO . Windows Server 2003 delivers on all these points. As companies migrate to the platform that is the de factowinner in the network and operating system wars, they face a huge learning curve and dilemma on how best to set up high-performance Windows Server networks for maximum availability and power. Their aspirations come down to one thing: service level-“How do we do it with Windows Server 2003?” Companies that have made the decision to migrate to Windows Server 2003 ask how they can keep systems up 24/7 or how they can achieve three, four, and perhaps even five times the availability with Microsoft technology. Network administrators ask, “Do we cluster, do we load balance, do we do both, do we invest in hot standbys, replication…what works?” This book gives you the answers to those questions. It will also go further than just failover and fault tolerance and discuss monitoring and operations management and choosing the right technology to accompany Microsoft s high-performance and high availability offerings. This is the book that caters to your needs. It is about achieving service level and keeping systems up 24/7 with the Windows Server 2003 platform. This book provides a clear and concise roadmap for how to go about using Microsoft Server 2003, in some cases with third-party add-ons, for scalability, uptime, performance, and management-and for how to avoid trouble at the same time. Many administrators and engineers find it hard to make decisions about what they need to do. They hear that clustering and using load balancing is a black art-extremely difficult and prone to disaster. Up until today, their only resources for architecting a high availability solution has been rare and expensive consultants and overzealous consulting services engineers, particularly from hardware vendors. If you are turned to Microsoft technology to achieve your SLA, this book will be the foundation to turn to, to bring it all together. Microsoft now offers a rich toolset for administration and monitoring, not only what is built into the server products, but also with collateral offerings such as Microsoft Operations Manager MOM and Systems Management Server. According to Gartner, Microsoft will own the systems administration market, and possibly surge ahead of IBM, in the coming years. Efforts in this area became very evident in 2003 and 2004 with the advent of new versions of MOM and Systems Management Server. We have thus devoted an entire chapter to monitoring and installing MOM as the essential operations platform for any high availability network. The book is divided into two parts: Part I, “High-Performance Windows Computing,” provides background for high availability, high performance, and service level, and covers theory, but also Active Directory architecture and implementation. Part II, “Building High Availability Windows Server 2003 Solutions,” delves into the actual installation and architecture of systems for print, file, SQL Server, Exchange, and IIS, covers network load balancing clusters NLB , and provides an introduction to MOM. Chapter 1, “The World of High-Performance, High availability Windows Computing,” covers service level, the meaning of high availability, downtime, failure, and more. We also define scale-out, availability, and high-performance computing HPC . In Chapter 2, “Choosing High-Performance Hardware,” we talk hardware and cover choosing high-performance equipment, standards, CPUs, and memory. Chapter 3, “Storage for Highly Available Systems,” certainly covers storage for these systems, but it also talks about redundancy and offers a RAID Refresher, discussing RAID controllers, Network Attached Storage Solutions NAS , Storage Area Networks SANs , and IP-Based Storage Solutions. In Chapter 4, “Highly Available Networking,” we discuss backbone design, b
