Clustering services have become increasingly essential for organisations deploying business-critical e-commerce and line-of-business applications.

A cluster is a group of computers working together to run a common set of applications and to show a unified system to the client and application. The computers are physically connected by cables and programmatically connected by cluster software. These connections allow computers to use failover and load balancing, which is not possible with a stand-alone computer.

Windows Server 2003 provides two types of clustering services:

Cluster Service (MSCS) Available only in Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition, this service provides high availability and scalability for mission-critical applications such as databases, messaging systems, and file and print services. Multiple servers (nodes) in a cluster remain in constant communication. If one of the nodes in a cluster becomes unavailable as a result of failure or maintenance, another node immediately begins providing service, a process known as failover. Users who are accessing the service continue to access the service, and are unaware that it is now being provided from a different server (node).

Network Load Balancing (NLB) Available in all editions of the Windows Server 2003 family, this service load balances incoming Internet Protocol (IP) traffic across clusters. Network Load Balancing enhances both the availability and scalability of Internet server-based programs such as Web servers, streaming media servers, and Terminal Services. By acting as the load balancing infrastructure and providing control information to management applications built on top of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Network Load Balancing can seamlessly integrate into existing Web server farm infrastructures.

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