NT & 2003 Clusterd together 1

[transmit]

I am considering clustering several servers and had first planed on upgrading my existing NT servers to 2003. However my budget does not alow for me to upgrade all my existing servers at this time, although I do have a new server budgeted witch will come with 2003. I am new to clustering and was not sure what would be the best route to take to maximise procesing power between servers. Any sugestions would be apreciated.

 

[flaurijssens]

MSCS clustering will not maximize processing power. It will, however, add redundancy. Depending on your current set-up, it therefore even may reduce your current processing power.

Some server and application types (mainly connectionless applications like some web applications) may be load-balanced. Although there is no guarantee, Windows load balancing (WLBS) may improve performance.

 

[transmit]

Thanks flaurijessens, two of the servers I was considering clustering are webservers. The one is being replaced by the new server (with more powerful CPU)witch will have 2003. This is because there are 3 or 4 times during the day that it gets hit hard and the CPU registers 100%. My other Web server is not accessed by as many users and does fine about 15% but I though if I clusterd it with the new server that could help. Will WLBS work with NT & 2003 ?

 

[flaurijssens]

Yes it will, but remember that your web site/application needs to be connectionless as well, meaning that it shouldn't matter when a client connects to different servers when browsing around on the site.

There are some settings to control this 'affiliation' behavior, in the WLBS settings (network connection properties, WLBS settings). The on-line help file may give you some clues, I dont have a WLBS cluster at hand at the moment to talk you through ;-)