Detecting faults with a high availability cluster

If you are not making use of a high availability cluster then you may have to put in much more effort than required when it comes to ensuring continuous up time  This is because only clustering can help you in ensuring that your applications remain available even after the servers that they are running on crash because of one reason or the other. In other words, if clustering is not there in the picture then your applications are likely to be unavailable. Of course, the applications will not be unavailable forever but their availability status is unlikely to change until you get the crashed servers fixed.

Nevertheless, if you want to understand why a high availability cluster is really important for your business then you must understand what it can do. To begin with, it can easily ensure that the aforesaid situation, i.e. the crashing of the servers does not affect the availability of your applications. It does so in two steps and saves you the trouble of having to deal with unavailable applications. Firstly, it is specifically designed to detect hardware faults. Just to let you know, even the software faults are easily detected by a good cluster. Secondly, it restarts the applications on other systems and does so almost immediately.

Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning that you can easily identify a good cluster by taking a look at the way it restarts the applications. If it does so without any administrative administration then you've most certainly chosen a cluster that’s apt for ensuring application high availability. Nevertheless, once you've got the right cluster, you may have to think about its configuration and management. The good news is that you can take care of both configuration and management by finding a suitable solution. All you have to do is to make sure that the solution has an intuitive graphical user interface; the GUI will centralize the processes, thereby taking care of your concerns.