Assembling the Clustering Planning Team

Teamwork is of the utmost importance in determining your clustering requirements. Planning your clustering strategy needs to be a cooperative project involving system administrators for the network and administrators for the following applications and services:

• Microsoft® SQL Server™ or other database
• Microsoft® Exchange Server or other groupware
• Microsoft® Internet Information Services (IIS) or other Web service
• Windows 2000 Terminal Services
• Windows Internet Name Service (WINS)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Internally developed line-of-business applications
• Third-party applications
• File and print shares

In most organizations, these applications and services are required to be highly available to users.

The core clustering planning team must identify specific high-availability needs for each of the mission-critical application and services mentioned. Collectively, this team will know enough about the use of these applications and services and the use of the network to avoid potential costly mistakes.

After you have determined your clustering strategy, plan to meet with your core clustering planning team to determine staffing requirements for the cluster configuration in your organization. Resources and applications running on a cluster might be administered differently than the same resources on a stand-alone server. Be sure that you determine the scope of these differences and train your staff accordingly. Also, be sure that your staff is aware of the requirements for high availability and understand how their actions could limit or reduce system availability. For example, an administrator who adds a new resource to a group containing hundreds of other resources could bring the entire group down (along with the resources it contains) if that administrator incorrectly configures the new resource.

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