Administering an ISP Installation

Enhancing Reliability

As the Internet continues to become more and more popular as a method for communication and for information retrieval, providing reliable Web hosting becomes more of a challenge. Grouping servers into a Web cluster is an effective way to enhance reliability, allowing you to manage several servers as a single unit. With your servers working together in a Web cluster, you will be able to more quickly detect and recover from server failure.

A Web cluster is any Web site that is served by more than one computer. You can set up a Web cluster by using Microsoft® Cluster Service, and then let Network Load Balancing for Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Advanced Server distribute user requests to the different servers in the Web cluster. This will prevent any one server from becoming overloaded by requests. For suggestions about setting up Cluster Service, as well as information about Network Load Balancing in a three-tier configuration, see Building a Web Cluster.

If you administer a site consisting of several servers together in a Web cluster, all of the servers need to be kept running constantly, so that connections from outside users will not be interrupted. Windows 2000 Server, IIS 5.0, and the Microsoft® Internet Information Services Resource Guide offer suggestions to help you prevent a potential overload, as well as tips about how to handle an overload, if one does occur.

This section includes information about the following:

Windows replication and clustering
Site Server 3.0 Content Deployment
IIS 5.0 fault tolerance
Network Load Balancing feature of Windows 2000 Server
Testing applications
Troubleshooting applications
rocess isolation
Tips on crash recovery

See the following: