Chapter 4 - Planning a Reliable Configuration

This chapter discusses planning what to do when failures occur from the viewpoint of:

• Deciding what hardware and software to procure.
• Developing your plan for doing backups.
• Developing training plans, disaster plans, and contingency plans.

Chapter 5, "Preparing for and Performing Recovery," discusses what information about your computers and which data on your computers you should back up. It also describes using these backups to recover from failures.

When planning an installation that includes computers running Windows NT Server and Windows NT Workstation, consider questions such as the following:

• How many computers running Windows NT Server and how many computers running Windows NT Workstation do you need for your enterprise?
• Are there computers running operating systems other than Windows NT Server and Windows NT Workstation in your enterprise?
• Where should the computers be located, and how should they be connected?
• How many single points of failure can you tolerate in your enterprise?
• What fault tolerance methods should you implement?
• Which data on the computers needs to be backed up, and what is your backup strategy?
• What records do you need to maintain to be able to troubleshoot problems or recover from failures?
• Where are you going to store your backups and other records necessary to your operation?

For each individual computer that is going to be using Windows NT Server or Windows NT Workstation, consider questions such as the following:

• What file system(s) should you use?
• How many controllers and disks do you need, and how should they be configured?
• Should some of your data be configured on fault-tolerant volumes?

If so, should you buy fault-tolerant hardware that can be used on a computer running Windows NT Workstation or Windows NT Server?

Or do you want to use the fault-tolerant software features available in Windows NT Server?

Another important topic to consider is disaster planning. Have you developed and tested solutions to occurrences such as fires, floods, and power outages before a disaster occurs?