Managing for highly available implementations

The key to establishing a highly available network is to identify the critical components, create redundancy for these components, and ensure automatic failover to the secondary component if the active component fails. Critical components include:

• Database
• Provisioning Servers
• vDisks and storage

Provisioning Services provides several options to consider when configuring for a highly available implementation, including:

• Database
  • Offline Database Support, which allows Provisioning Servers to use a snapshot of the database if the connection to the database is lost.
  • Database Mirroring.
• Provisioning Servers
  • Provisioning Server Failover. If a server becomes unavailable, another server within the site can provide active target devices with the vDisk.
  • Managing Servers. You can load balance between Provisioning Servers to prevent overload and to allow server capacity to be used more effectively and efficiently.
• vDisks and Storage
  • Configuring Highly Available Shared Storage