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High Availability

Providing high availability to mission-critical applications, services, and data is a primary objective of successful IT departments. When services are down or fail, business continuity is interrupted, which can result in significant losses. Windows Server 2008 supports many key high-availability features to help organizations meet their uptime requirements for their critical systems such as Failover Clustering, Network Load Balancing (NLB), Shadow Copy, Windows Server Backup and a new Windows Recovery Environment.

Failover Clustering

Failover clustering can help you build redundancy into your network and eliminate single points of failure. Learn more at our extensive
Failover Clustering site.

Failover Clustering site

  • Failover Clustering Overviews

  • Interactive Diagrams

  • Partner Solutions

  • Customer Case Studies

  • FAQs

  • Resources, Whitepapers and Datasheets

  • Community Resources

Network Load Balancing

Network Load Balancing (NLB) allows you to distribute TCP/IP requests to multiple systems in order to optimize resource utilization, decrease computing time, and ensure system availability. NLB has been improved in Windows Server 2008, including:

  • Next Generation TCP/IP

    The TCP/IP protocol suite has been completely redesigned for Windows Server 2008. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) are both supported natively by Windows Server 2008. NLB extends full support to IPv6 for all communication while maintaining IPv4 support.

  • Multiple IP Address Support

    Each node in your NLB cluster can now have multiple dedicated IP addresses.

  • Microsoft ISA Server Integration

    Microsoft ISA Server can support your mixed IPv4 and IPv6 infrastructure by allowing multiple IP addresses for each NLB node where IPv4 and IPv6 clients are used. ISA Server can also provide intrusion detection services to protect your NLB cluster.

Learn more about NLB at the HA Windows Server TechCenter.

Shadow Copy, Windows Server Backup and Windows Recovery

Windows Server 2008 contains new and updated features to help you create backups and, if needed, perform a recovery of your operating system, applications, and data. By using these features appropriately and implementing good operational practices, you can improve your organization's ability to recover from damaged or lost data, hardware failures, and disasters.

There are several features in Windows Server 2008 that you can use together to create backups and perform recoveries of your server systems and data. These include the following:

  • Shadow Copies of Shared Folders
    Shadow Copies of Shared Folders provides point-in-time copies of files that are located on shared resources, such as a file server.

  • Windows Server Backup tools
    Windows Server Backup is a feature in Windows Server 2008 that provides a set of wizards and other tools for you to perform basic backup and recovery tasks for your servers running Windows Server 2008. This feature has been redesigned and introduces new technology.

  • Windows Recovery Environment
    Windows Recovery Environment in Windows Server 2008 is a partial version of the operating system and a set of tools that you can use to perform operating system or full server recoveries (along with a backup that you created earlier using Windows Server Backup).

Learn more about the features at the Backup and Recovery Windows Server TechCenter.

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