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Building High Availability Windows Server 2003 Solutions
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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 facto winner 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 nines 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 and 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, bandwidth, and what to look for in network interface cards, hubs, switches,
and routers. We'll also look into layer two, three, and four switches and routers,
routing in high availability architecture, and using hubs for failover interconnects.
This chapter also introduces SAN topology, fibre channel, Point-to-Point Topology
for storage area networks, FC-AL, Fabric, and zoning.
If you need to design the architecture for an Active Directory network then,
Chapter 5, "Preparing the Platform for a High-Performance Network,"
is for you. This chapter covers preparing the platform for a high-performance
network and creating a design plan, design goals, design components, design
decisions, design implications, and more. This chapter also covers Active Directory
services and logical architecture, the forest plan for highly available systems.
The latter part of the chapters covers Active Directory physical architecture,
such as subnets, site links and naming convention.
Chapter 6, "Building the Foundations for a Highly Available Architecture,"
covers building the foundations for a highly available architecture. This chapter
also covers Windows Clustering 101, cluster models, quorum resources, quorum
resource deployment scenarios, and more. We also go into the forest creation
process, how to form clusters creating shared disk resources, and preparing
the cluster network.
The first chapter in Part II, Chapter 7, "High-Performance Print-Server
Solutions," looks into high-performance print-server cluster solutions.
We will look at design specifications, installations, and clustering the spooler
resource.
Like printing, every network needs files servers. Some networks need to have
a highly available file-server solution. Chapter 8, "High-Performance File-Server
Solutions," covers high-performance file-server solutions, scale-out versus
scale-up, Configuring 2-Node clusters, disk replication solutions, and so on.
Chapter 9, "High availability, High-Performance SQL Server Solutions,"
introduces scale-out versus scale-up with Microsoft SQL Server, failover for
SQL Server, SQL Server cluster design, documenting the dependencies of the cluster,
and so on. We look at the SQL Server Active/Active configurations, multiple
instance solutions, N+1 configurations, and so on. We also cover noncluster
redundancy solutions, such as replication, and show, step-by-step, how to cluster
the Analysis Services (OLAP).
Chapter 10, "High availability, High-Performance Exchange," covers
scale-out versus scale-up with Microsoft Exchange, storage group architecture,
exchange store considerations, transaction logs, the SMTP queue directory, Exchange
permissions in the clustering architecture, and so on. The section titled "Getting
Started with Exchange 2003 Clustering" covers installing the Exchange Virtual
Server on the cluster nodes and how to cluster Exchange using replicated disk
technology and Microsoft Cluster Services.
Chapter 11, "Load Balancing," deals with scale-out, Network Load
Balancing (network load balancing) for high-performance solutions, sharing server
load, what cannot be scaled, selecting NLB clustering, and more. We look into
what constitutes a candidate for NLB, architecture for and designing the NLB
cluster, setup and configuration of the NLB cluster, and so on.
In Chapter 12, "Internet Information Server," we turn to the Web
and go into scale-out versus scale-up IIS, round-robin DNS load balancing, NLB
for Internet Information Serer, planning and configuration, IIS Storage, NLB
for FTP and troubleshooting and maintaining the IIS NLB server cluster.
Chapter 13, "Looking for Trouble: Setting up Performance Monitoring and
Alerts," is all about operations management. The first half of this chapter
delves into the Windows Server 2003 monitoring systems, the event viewer, system
and performance monitoring objects, rate and throughput, the work queue, response
time, and more. The second half covers MOM. We will cover the steps to take
in a MOM rapid-deployment project. These steps involve verifying software and
hardware requirements for MOM, the MOM service accounts, MOM database sizing,
installing the First Management Server, importing MOM 2005 Management Packs,
and so on. We also show you how you can trap alerts to the event logs and how
MOM collects these and emails the alerts to operators and the event log.
Windows Server 2003 high availability and high-performance engineering is not
an easy vocation. We hope this book will provide you with the kick-start you
need to correctly implement your own high availability, high-performance systems.
If there are issues you need clarification on, or you need some advice, we will
certainly try and help
Table of Contents
1. The World of High-Performance, High Availability Windows Computing.
2. Choosing High-Performance Hardware.
3. Storage for Highly Available Systems.
4. Highly Available Networks.
5. Preparing the Platform for a High-Performance Network.
6. Building the Foundations for a Highly Available Architecture.
7. High-Performance Print-Server Solutions.
8. High-Performance File-Server Solution.
9. High Availability, High-Performance SQL Server Solutions.
10. High Availability, High-Performance Exchange.
11. Load Balancing.
12. Internet Information Server.
13. Looking for Trouble: Setting up Performance Monitoring and Alerts.
About the Authors
Jeffrey R. Shapiro has specialized in Microsoft technologies
since 1989, and has published eleven books on network administration and software
development. He is technical lead and chief architect for ZLB Plasma Services,
a firm with 50 locations throughout the U.S. As leader of ZLB's NetWare-to-Windows
migration team, he architected its nationwide Active Directory, SQL Server,
and Exchange network. Previously, he led Broward County, Florida's NetWare-to-Windows
2000 migration project, architecting three mission-critical high performance
data centers supporting 6,000 users.
Marcin Policht is author of WMI Essentials for Automating Windows
Management (Sams, 2001) and co-author of Windows Server 2003 Bible.
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