Chapter 7: Planning for High Availablity

In the lab from this chapter, I got to play around with server clustering. I knew in an abstract way what it was, but it was cool to get my proverbial hands dirty. It's amazing to me how many technologies dealing with various kind of redundancies have sprung up in the modern era. RAID, clusters, failover, shadow copies, and so forth are all there to make sure that precious data is not lost and is always available. Who would have thought we'd be here back in 1980? I think the thing that impressed me most was how low-hassle a process setting up a cluster is. Pick an unused IP address, attach some hosts and Windows takes care of the rest. I am going to have to go back through the chapter and see if I can figure out why I wasn't able to use the configured URL for the cluster, though. I have a feeling that's important.