Summary

Building out your company's infrastructure architecture with clustering technology at the heart is a huge step toward achieving the end-game of five 9s. Now, by definition, every application, system component, or database you deploy on this architecture has this added element of resilience. And, in many cases, the application or system component changes needed to take advantage of these clustering technologies are completely transparent! Utilizing a combination of both network load balancing (NLB) and cluster services (MSCS) allows you to not only failover applications but to scale for increasing network capacity. The flexibility that Microsoft has built into these clustering offerings and the extended offerings from other hardware and software vendors put you in a much more desirable position as far as managing this type of infrastructure and achieving your high availability goals. You should have no hesitation in moving forward with these technologies as quickly as you can.

In Chapter 5, we will be installing SQL Server 2000, using its SQL clustering option with MSCS. This will enable us to make SQL Server highly available. As part of this process, we will also be incorporating Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) as a resource that needs to be managed by the cluster (and is used by SQL Server for distributed transactions). More on this subject in Chapter 5.