Unix® System Management Primer Plus

Using Server Clusters

Server failure is another threat to high availability. In previous sections of this chapter, you've learned about using redundancy to promote high availability by providing better performance and failure recovery. The high-availability techniques you've read about have applied to telco lines, ports, NICs, cables, and switches. Server clustering is a high-availability technique used to provide redundancy for server operations.

A server is a much more complex system component than a NIC or a switch is. As a general-purpose machine, a server can perform several different tasks at any one time. Fault-tolerant servers duplicate internal subsystems to prevent any one failure from taking down the machine, but these servers are ...