Provide High Availability for a File or Print Server

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

In this scenario, the goal is to provide high availability for a file or print server. The design can easily be extended to provide high availability for multiple file or print servers, assuming that server and network capacity are sufficient. The actions that users perform in this scenario—file and print actions on a networked server—must automatically be retried by the client computer if interrupted. This is necessary because a user action might sometimes be performed during a failover, meaning that the action would be interrupted (briefly) while failover occurred and would require an automatic retry to complete without further user action.

For more information, see Design for a Clustered File or Print Server and Example, Clustered File or Print Server.

For example, A. Datum Corporation may want to provide employees at their downtown location with a file server that achieves 99.99% availability (down for less than 1 hour per year).

For additional deployment goals, such as the goal of providing both high availability and a disaster recovery option for a file or print server, see Identifying Your Failover Cluster Deployment Goals.

Additional references

Appendix B: Identifying Availability Requirements for a Failover Cluster