Provide High Availability for a Service or Application

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

In this scenario, the goal is to provide high availability for a client-server application or service. If an action that is made by a user of the application is interrupted, the application must automatically retry the action. This is necessary because a user action might sometimes be performed during a failover, meaning that the action would be interrupted (briefly) while failover occurred and would require an automatic retry to complete without further user action.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Design for a Clustered Instance of a Service or Application

• Example, Clustered Instance of a Service or Application

For example, A. Datum Corporation may want to provide employees at their downtown location with a client-server application that achieves 99.99% availability (down for less than 1 hour per year).

For additional deployment goals, such as the goal of providing high availability for a file or print server, see Identifying Your Failover Cluster Deployment Goals.

Additional references

Appendix B: Identifying Availability Requirements for a Failover Cluster