Optimizing Your Clusters

Windows 2000 Advanced Server uses an adaptable architecture and is largely self-tuning when it comes to performance. Additionally, Advanced Server is able to allocate resources dynamically as needed to meet changing usage requirements.

The goal in tuning a server and the applications it load balances is to determine which hardware resource will experience the greatest demand, and then adjust the configuration to handle that demand and maximize total throughput.

For example, if the primary role of a cluster is to provide high availability of file and print services, high disk use will be incurred due to the large number of files being accessed. File and print services also cause a heavy load on network adapters because of the large amount of data that is being transferred. It is important to make sure that your network adapter and cluster subnet can handle the load. In this example, RAM typically does not carry a heavy load, although memory usage can be heavy if a large amount of RAM is allocated to the file system cache. Processor utilization is also typically low in this environment. In such cases, memory and processor utilization usually do not need the optimizing that other components need. Memory can often be used effectively to reduce the disk utilization, especially for disk read operations.

In contrast, a server-application environment (such as Microsoft Exchange) is much more processor-intensive and RAM-intensive than a typical file or print server environment because much more processing is taking place at the server. In these cases, it is best to use high-end multiprocessor servers. The disk and network loads tend to be less utilized, because the amount of data being sent is smaller. Microsoft load balancing solutions use little of the system resources either for host-to-host communications or for the operation of the cluster itself.

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