Tag Archives: High Availability

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The Benefits Of Cloud Services Adoption

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How Can Cloud Services Adoption Benefit Your Business?

Cloud based services are available in various forms and at different levels.  Just about anyone from a home consumer all the way up to a multinational corporation can purchase, or consume for free, cloud services.  But just like anything else, why should anyone use cloud services?  Is all the hype really substantive?  I would like to propose that cloud based services provide a benefit that is sometimes difficult to recognize.  I want to share with you exactly how businesses can benefit from cloud services adoption.

There are particular aspects of operating a business that that are vital to the revenue cycle. One of the them is uptime. Uptime is measured by the amount of time a businesses systems are accessible to customers. If your customers can’t access your systems to purchase goods or services, your business can’t make money. Cloud services can help to eliminate the negative impact downtime can have to your sales by increasing the number of available zones your business systems can operate in. Most cloud service vendors have zones across the world. This helps to provide constant availability. Which in turn, increases uptime.  How much would you be willing to pay for constant availability? More importantly, how much would it cost you to ensure that kind of availability for your business?

Another aspect of business operations that is a direct benefit of cloud services adoption is disaster recovery (DR).  A cloud service implementation could be used as part of an overall DR plan.  This plan could couple with a Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan.  Think of how have deploying some, or all of your IT infrastructure with a cloud service provider could solidify one or both of these plans.  Based on your business needs and decisions made concerning either your COOP or DR plan, a cloud based service could be a definite base camp.  Additionally,  think of how these types of business requirements would be met by implementing a comprehensive cloud strategy for you IT infrastructure.  How would you plan for a disaster or an outage that affects you continuity if your services already running in different parts of the world?  How much is having a COOP and DR plan that could literally be bullet proof worth to you?

I don’t want to forget the about the issue of security since it’s such a hot topic.  However, I think I’ll save it for a later post.  The fact is, many companies have there data and services with cloud service providers.  Based on my use of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, security starts with the way you configure your accessible assets.  A complete understanding of your providers security model is the first goal to accomplish.  Then you can go from there.

Take some time to muddle over these ideas on cloud services adoption and let me know what you think.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Failover Clustering

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Considering Failover Clustering For Your Environment

I recently had the opportunity to assist with the deployment of SQL Server 2012 in a failover cluster on vSphere 5.5.  I have to admit, the vSphere tasks had not changed since I deployed a file service cluster on Server 2008 R2 last year.  You’ll be happy to know that the VMware setup document was straight forward and easy to follow.  This experience reminded me of the article I wrote back in Sept of last year (Clusters for Service Consolidation).  In the article, I proposed the use of Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) as method of consolidating services in the datacenter.  A cluster could have multiple roles configured.  This could open the door to a more available datacenter at an infrastructure level.  However, the one thing I did want to expose here, is that there is a definite improvement in the failover cluster service in Server 2012 R2.  The storage/quorum issues experienced with 2008 R2 failover clustering are not an issue with 2012 R2.  This is significant, since the 2008 R2 cluster experienced loss of quorum due to storage problems, while the 2012 R2 cluster on the same storage didn’t skip a beat.  I was very impressed with the new performance and would recommend seriously considering MSCS as a major player in your datacenter.  Before you start your project though, I recommend taking the time to read the documentation before you make the first click.  I know how hard that can be sometimes, but you’ll be glad you did.  Below are a few more resources to learn more about the new features and prepare for your deployment.

 What’s New in Failover Clustering in Windows Server

Microsoft Clustering with VMware vSphere Design Guide

Migration Paths for Migrating to a Failover Cluster Running Windows Server 2012 R2

Deploy highly scalable tenant network infrastructure for hosting providers

Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Compute Foundations

Clusters for Service Consolidation

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Using Microsoft Cluster Services to Consolidate Your Infrastructure

As I mentioned in a previous post, Failover Clustering Overview | Windows Server 2008 R2, the idea of using Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) to host multiple services seemed quite viable as HA solution.  For many companies that use Microsoft server products as the foundation of their infrastructure, there could be great benefit in consolidating their services into clusters.  The benefits could include ease of upgrade and patching using the rolling upgrade method, as well as ability to scale the solution as the business grows.  Services such as DHCP, Exchange, SQL Server, and File Services could be consolidated into one or multiple clusters.  Architected with disaster recovery in mind, services could be failed over to a cluster in another site.  That could help to knock out two problems with one solution.  To give you an idea of what I am talking about, please review this TechNet article – How A Cluster Server Works.  The article is a little dated but the information is so good that I had to add it to the mix.  Please let me know what you think, and if you have any questions.  I would be happy to share my thoughts.

How A Cluster Server Works

Failover Clustering Overview | Windows Server 2008 R2

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Late last year, I began working on a migration project to move a single Windows Sever file service to a two node failover cluster using Windows Server 2008 R2. The configuration was implemented in a VMware vShpere 4.1 tenant datacenter.  I was not able to use Windows Server 2012 because vSphere 4.1 doesn’t support it.  It has been a few months since the completion of the project, and I have had some time to reflect on the outcome.

The project was very successful. VMware provides a cluster setup document that was not overly complicated to follow. I was even able to integrate our existing Tivoli Storage Manager backup client into the solution with great ease. Now that the project is complete, I am envisioning how clusters might be scaled to simplify the management of an entire environment. Consider using Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) to power all of your higher level services, such as DHCP, File and Print, SQL Server, Exchange Server, DFS and other cluster aware applications. Could it be possible to setup say a ten node cluster to support all of your important business and LAN services?  Of course, if you needed more servers, adding additional ones would not be impossible.

In the coming weeks I would like to investigate this possibility.   First to determine if it’s feasible, and second, is it practical. It’s an exciting opportunity from my perspective, and I hope some of you might think so as well.

Failover Clustering Overview

What’s New in Failover Clusters in Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESXi/ESX (1004617)

 

Severalnines – Configurator for MySQL Cluster

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For the past few months I have been working with the MySQL Cluster product.  I have to admit, it’s not an easy hill to climb.  When I initially started working to setup a cluster, I associated it with many of the other clustered solutions I had worked with.  However, there were some basic differences that I had to get used to.  MySQL Cluster doesn’t use shared storage and it’s designed based on three separate node types.  Each of which, could run on a single server.  I had to get used to that.  Once I began to understand those two basic concepts, things went much better.  It’s easy to get a cluster of two separate servers up and running, but then comes special considerations for your specific data needs.  I was trying to import a database from a single MySQL instance into the new cluster.  The definite key word here is “trying”.  As a result of searching on the Internet for all the different errors I encountered, I found a company call Severalnines.  This company is awesome when it comes to MySQL.  They provide a site they call a “Configurator”.  By using this site, I was able to get so much closer to the goal.  I recommend checking this company out, but definitely check out the configurator site if you’re just starting to work with MySQL Cluster.  You’ll save a lot of time.

 

Severalnines – Configurator for MySQL Cluster.