Planning for Cluster Service

The Cluster service in Windows 2000 Advanced Server provides a foundation for server clusters. When one server in a cluster fails or is taken offline, another server in the cluster takes over the operations of the failed server. Clients using server resources experience little or no interruption of their work because support for resources is moved from one server to the other.

On server clusters, the Cluster service manages all cluster-specific activity. There is one instance of the Cluster service running on every node in a cluster. Specifically, the Cluster service handles the following operations:

• Manages cluster objects, cluster disks, and configuration.
• Coordinates with other instances of the Cluster service in the cluster.
• Performs failover operations.
• Handles event notification.
• Facilitates communication among other software components.

You know that your organization requires server clusters if:

• Your users depend on regular access to business-critical data and applications in order to do their jobs.
• You cannot accept service downtime (unplanned or planned) of more that 30 minutes.
• The cost of a backup server is less than the cost of having business-critical data and applications offline during a failure.

Note

The term "backup server" generally implies that one server is sitting idle until it is needed. That is not the primary purpose of a server cluster, although it could be configured that way.

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