Making Your System Fault Tolerant
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
Topic Last Modified: 2016-12-01
You have probably already taken steps to design fault tolerance in your system, using practices such as ensuring hardware redundancy, guarding against power loss, routinely installing security updates and antivirus measures, and monitoring server activity. These practices benefit not only your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 infrastructure, but also your entire network. If you have not implemented these practices, we recommend that you do so before deploying Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
Hardware Redundancy
It is crucial that you incorporate special server and storage hardware configurations that build redundancy in the hardware within your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment so that you minimize single points of failure. By incorporating such measures, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 hardware components can fail without affecting server operations.
The hardware you use to minimize the single points of failure depends on which components you want to make redundant. Some of the latest products from hardware vendors build redundancy into their server or storage solution products, so there may be no necessity to physically install redundant units.
Note
Beyond the technologies presented, a detailed discussion about additional technologies associated with this type of hardware is outside the scope of this guide.
Power Control
Using an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to increase fault tolerance in your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 organization is a necessity for servers that contain mission-critical data, especially in large deployments. A UPS and battery backup provide protection against power surges and short-term power losses that can cause damage to your servers, disk storage units, and the data they contain. If the location of your servers requires cooling to keep the hardware working properly, consider making the climate control system fault tolerant. For example, keep a battery backup power supply available for each cooling unit.
Security Updates and Antivirus Measures
To help protect the servers in your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 organization from accidental or purposeful harm that may result in downtime, take the following precautions:
Keep your servers up-to-date with security updates. Subscribing to the Microsoft Security Notification Service helps ensure that you receive immediate notification of security bulletin releases for any Microsoft product. To subscribe, go to the Microsoft Technical Security Notifications Web site at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=139796.
Ensure that access permissions are set up correctly.
Keep your servers in a physical environment that prevents unauthorized access. Ensure that adequate antivirus software is installed on all your servers. Keep the software up-to-date with the latest virus signature files. Use the automatic update feature of your antivirus application to keep the virus signatures current.
Monitoring
Manage, monitor, and troubleshoot your servers and applications on an ongoing basis to help maximize system reliability. If a problem occurs, react quickly so that you can recover data and make it available as soon as possible. System Center Operations Manager 2007 is a system-wide monitoring solution and provides a management pack that you can use with Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
Ensuring Availability of Active Directory Domain Services and DNS
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 relies on Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and DNS. If either is unavailable, the server cannot function. For this reason, ensure that domain controllers, global catalog servers, and DNS servers in your organization are well protected from possible failure.
In addition, to help maximize the safety of your Active Directory information, use multiple domain servers.