INFO: Application Center 2000 and Microsoft Cluster Service (263163)

MORE INFORMATION

MSCS clusters provide failover functionality for applications that have state information that is stored on a disk, which can be owned by any node in the cluster, or is stored in the registry that is shared through the quorum disk resource.

Application Center 2000 is intended to be used to manage the Web and application tiers of WinDNA applications. Application Center is based on a "shared-nothing" architecture, which is generally the architecture of the Web/application tiers that it is intended to manage. The recommended technologies for increasing availability and scalability of these layers are network load balancing (NLB), third-party load balancing, and COM+ load balancing. MSCS and these technologies are not intended to be used on the same computers and are not integrated.

High availability of data services can be attained by using MSCS on a set of Microsoft SQL Server computers, but these computers should not be running Application Center 2000. If there are also physical Web or application tiers that access those clustered SQL Servers, then Application Center 2000 can certainly be used on those tiers, but Application Center 2000 should not be running on the same computers as MSCS. These technologies can, however, be used together in a complete architecture, to complement each other.