How do you prepare for disaster? Do you have procedures in place to properly create and restore a full backup...just in case? Whether you're managing as few as 5 servers or as many as 5000, you need to prepare for the worst. SafeGuarding Your Windows Servers provides a collection of the best resources for planning and implementing high availability as well as the proper tools and procedures for recovering from a disaster. This eBook provides useful guidelines for safeguarding your Windows file-and-print servers, Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and more. An assortment of tips will also help you tie it all together and get the most out of your high-availability solutions. This essential guide of practical information will help you build a safety-net around your systems -- one you won't want to be without.
Foreword
Ensuring that your systems are up and running can be a constant challenge in even the best-managed environments. Fortunately, today's administrators have a variety of tools to build a safety net around their servers, including backup and recovery, clustering, and data replication to name a few. And although you'll find a glut of information about high-availability concepts and strategies, as well as a plethora of data discussing the engineering details of high-availability solutions' components, you're probably ready for something that shows you how to put those components to use in your IT environment.
The first chapter describes the basic blueprints to guide you through the process of configuring a high-availability Windows 2000 file server, Web server, or DNS server.
Chapter 2 shows you how NTBackup, the Removable Storage service, and Task Scheduler work together and how to allocate tapes, create scheduled jobs, and remove failed tapes. To help you better design solutions for disaster recovery, you should think about disaster-recovery planning as a means to minimize the amount of time that your users are separated from business data, regardless of the circumstances. In
Chapter 3, we'll look at a sample disaster scenario to see how Microsoft Dfs can play a part in your disaster-recovery plan and help you minimize the time you spend reconnecting users to certain types of data.
Chapter 4 focuses on the clustering features and functionality in Windows 2003 and further defines the various forms of clustering available. Many people break the subject of high availability into two parts—disaster prevention and disaster recovery—and discuss the topic as if every step in a high-availability solution fits neatly into one arena or the other.
Chapter 5 defines "disaster" as a loss of production data or downtime that causes a loss of productivity and provides some best practices that will help you prepare for the worst.
In Chapter 6, we'll look at tackling high-availability problems when implementing transactional replication and continuous data synchronization.
Chapter 7 addresses recovering from isolated disasters—specifically, failures that affect only part of your database.
In Chapter 8, we'll show you what steps you need to take to restore the IS to a recovery server without bringing down the production server. And if you're considering clustering Exchange, you can take several steps to improve your deployment.
Chapter 9 provides eight ways to improve your Exchange Server cluster, and Chapter 10 tells you what you need to know about Exchange 2000 Server backup and restore. Finally, the last chapter provides a collection of tips to help you tie it all together and get the most out of your high-availability solutions. All together, this eBook provides an essential guide of practical information for building a safety-net around your systems—one you won't want to miss.
— Bob Chronister, Kalen Delaney, Dick Lewis, Brian Moran, Daragh Morrissey, Mike Otey, Tony Redmond, Paul Robichaux, Spyros Sakellariadis, Douglas R. Spindler, Bill Stewart, Alan Sugano, Douglas Toombs, Kimberly L. Tripp, and Gary Zaika
