Clustering Made Manageable

[Eileen]

There’s no doubt that a clustered server configuration plays a vital role in mission-critical application environments. It keeps applications running by failing over applications to servers in the same data center or at remote disaster recovery sites. But from a data center administration standpoint, it can be a real pain.

Adding servers, storage, or applications can be a hassle. Even moving an application from one server to another may not be easy using some vendor’s clustering solutions, especially when such moves were not planned in the original set-up. But taking advantage of Veritas Cluster Server’s Management Console helps you better manage your clustered servers by streamlining many tasks and providing visibility and control of all of your clusters, regardless of the operating system, location, or if the server is virtual or physical.

Here’s a look at how the Cluster Server Management Console helps with three major clustering headaches:

1. Initiating Disaster Recovery: You hope to never need your disaster recovery site, but in an actual disaster, time will be of the essence. Also, IT staff, dealing with evacuation or other issues, may be unable to come to work. The Cluster Server Management Console dramatically cuts the time and manpower needed to transfer applications from your main site to your DR site. Instead of having multiple staff members log in and move clusters one by one to the DR site, you can move your entire data center to the DR site with a few clicks on the Management Console. You can even do it from a remote location, including the DR site itself.
2. Compliance Reporting: No one in IT likes having to provide detailed reports on availability, uptimes and performance. But with compliance regulations multiplying, and more and more IT departments faced with internal service level agreements, reporting is a fact of life. Nothing will ever make it fun, but the Cluster Server Management Console simplifies reporting by automatically generating customizable reports on such things as uptime and application failures.
3. Testing Disaster Recovery: According to recent Symantec research, only 55 percent of companies test their disaster recovery plans more often than once a year. That doesn’t sound so bad, until you consider another statistic from the same study: When companies do test, 48 percent of those tests—nearly half—turn out to be failures.

Testing often gets neglected because it impacts your production environment and is labor-intensive. Someone has to actually pull systems out of production while someone else goes to the disaster recovery site to start up the applications there and make sure everything’s running smoothly. With many data centers understaffed, it’s not always possible to take the time required for all this. The Cluster Server Management Console lets you test your recovery processes from a single interface without impacting your production applications. You can isolate a server in the DR site, load the applications that would run there in a failover, and make sure everything is working correctly. And you can do it right from your main data center.

Clustered configurations are becoming more commonplace, more complex, and more often include virtual as well as physical servers. Keeping on top of them all is a tough job, and keeps getting tougher. The Veritas Cluster Server Management Console can help.

[JonD]

Eileen
        By chance have any white papers on VCS with Windows 2008 ?  Have a client who is balking at the concept due to uncertainty of compatability of Windows 2008 with VCS and EV.

Jon

[Eileen]

Hi Jon,

I have posted a couple of white papers to the Storage and the Clustering and Replication Communities and have one more on the way.  Check out:

1)  Enhancing Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Availability with Veritas Storage Foundation™ for Windows® - Clustering Community

2)  Technical White Paper: Enhancing Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Availability with Veritas Storage Foundation™ for Windows® - Storage Communtiy

I'm also waiting on an additional white paper that focuses on how Storage Foundation for Windows High Availability optimizes availability for Exchange.

Let me know if these help with your questions, if not, you might want to post a more specific question to the forum.

Thanks,

Eileen