What is the best practise for installing IS cluster.
We are planning to install OS Cluster (Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition ) and IS Cluster.
Is it Correct ???
Please suggest
Warm Regards,
Gopinath K.M
A common approach is to use a load balancer in front of multiple IS instances. This provides scalability and a degree of high-availability. Use of OS clustering with IS is not necessary nor supported.
The use of IS clustering as provided by wM may or may not be useful, depending upon your needs. You’ll want to make sure you understand exactly what IS clustering does and does not provide before committing to it. There seems to have been quite a bit of misunderstanding in the past about what it really does.
There are a couple of discussion threads here on the forums that cover IS clustering functionality, including one titled “IS clustering to be avoided”, that you may find helpful.
I could mitigate a little : with some adapters, IS clustering is cumbersome or difficult to configure / implement. OS active/passive clustering helps a lot to achieve high availability in case of server hardware failure. And there is no impact on the I.S. itself.
I have seen OS clustering used with IS successfully. But it is not an officially supported configuration. And IMO, not necessary. A load-balanced cluster of IS instances (whether using IS clustering or not) is typically sufficient.
Load balanced IS instances work very well in most cases as Rob pointed out and without the complexity and other issues associated with IS clustering. Active/Passive clustering works as well and can be used when your licensing agreement would be violated by the extra node in a load balanced situation.
Great point on the licensing aspect. However, be aware that IS in an OS cluster is not supported by wM so if you run into issues related to that, they won’t help. And if you run into some issue, they may require that you duplicate the problem in a non-clustered environment before they will help. Unless of course they’ve changed their policy on IS in OS clusters.
We discussed about licensing aspect before implementing our OS active/passive clustering and they replied there is no issue as long as both nodes aren’t running the application in the same time (but it’s as it’s active/passive, no risk), and as long as both node has the same number of CPU.