User Guide

Novell Cluster Services Overview and Installation

103-000154-001

August 29, 2001

Novell Confidential

Manual 99a38 July 17, 2001

Product Benefits

Novell Cluster Services allows you to configure up to 32 NetWare servers into

a high-availability cluster, where resources can be dynamically switched or

moved to any server in the cluster. Resources can be configured to

automatically switch or be moved in the event of a server failure, or can be

moved manually to troubleshoot hardware or balance the workload.

Novell Cluster Services provides high availability from commodity

components. Lower costs are obtained through the consolidation of

applications and operations onto a cluster. The ability to manage a cluster from

a single point of control and to adjust resources to meet changing workload

requirements (thus, manually “load balance” the cluster) are also important

benefits of Novell Cluster Services.

An equally important benefit of implementing Novell Cluster Services is that

you can reduce unplanned service outages and reduce planned outages for

software and hardware maintenance and upgrades.

Reasons you would want to implement Novell Cluster Services include:

Increased availability

Improved performance

Low cost of operation

Scalability

Disaster recovery

Data protection

Shared resources

Shared disk fault tolerance can be obtained by implementing RAID Level 5

on the shared disk subsystem.

An example of the benefits Novell Cluster Services provides can be better

understood through the following scenario.

Suppose you have configured a three-server cluster, with a Web server

installed on each of the three servers in the cluster. Each of the servers in the

cluster hosts two Web sites. All the data, graphics, and e-mail messages for

each Web site is stored on a shared disk subsystem connected to each of the

servers in the cluster. The following figure depicts how this setup might look.