Introduction

High availability is a buzzword in today's networking world, and for good reason. Ensuring that the network's resources are available to users when they need them is an important part of the network administrator's job. Downtime whether caused by a disk failure, a performance slowdown, data loss due to an attack, or the loss of an entire server due to a natural disaster such as fire or flood cuts into worker productivity and impacts the business's bottom line or the organization's ability to accomplish its goals.

In the previous chapter, we looked at server clustering and network load balancing as part of a high-availability network. In this chapter, we will look at the concept of high availability and how it can be attained. We'll provide an overview of performance bottlenecks and what causes them, and show you how to identify such common system bottlenecks as memory, processor, disk, and network components. We'll walk you through the steps of using the System Monitor utility to track server performance and show you how to use Event Viewer and service logs to monitor server issues, as well.

Next, we show you how to plan a backup and recovery strategy. We'll review the Windows Backup Utility and the differences between full, incremental, and differential backups. We'll also discuss the use of the Volume Shadow Copy feature as a backup option. We'll review how to decide what information should be backed up. We'll also show you how to back up user data, system state data,...