From the course: Configure and Manage SharePoint On-Premises

Design for high availability

From the course: Configure and Manage SharePoint On-Premises

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Design for high availability

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- [Instructor] A high availability strategy is an important requirement for a production SharePoint Server environment. Now, before you can create a realistic and economical high availability architecture and strategy for your SharePoint environment, you have to define and quantify your availability goals. These goals reflect the extent to which your organization depends on SharePoint Server, and how a loss of service might affect the organization's operations. The effect of the loss of service, depends on the nature of the loss, meaning whether it's a full or only partial loss, and the duration of the loss. A successful high availability strategy must reflect the specific needs of your organization. Additionally, it must provide an optimal balance between business requirements, IT service level agreements, and the availability of technical solutions, along with IT support capabilities and infrastructure costs. After identifying the availability requirements for organization, you can begin to create a high availability design and strategy, that reduces the risk of downtime and reduced operations. IT professionals who design and deploy highly available systems, use a couple of guiding principles to meet their goals. First, they eliminate single points of failure for each fault domain and the entire system at every possible layer, whether it be the operating system, software, and the SharePoint application. And then the other is to implement very rapid fault detection, isolation, and resolution. High availability solutions are broad in scope, and provide a set of system wide shared resources that are integrated to provide predefined required services. The solution uses different combinations of hardware and software, to minimize downtime and restore services when the system or part of the system were to fail. A fault tolerance solution is hardware centric and uses specialized hardware to detect faults and instantly switch to a redundant hardware component. This component could be a processor, could be memory, power supply, input output subsystem, or even the storage subsystem. The switch to a redundant component provides a high level of service. A cost benefit analysis of fault tolerant solutions and high availability solutions, enables organizations to create an effective strategy to meet the availability goals for their SharePoint farm. Typically, there are cost trade offs between the two solutions. A process that implements high availability, is one that tends to be one of the more expensive investments for a SharePoint farm. As the level of availability and the number of systems that you want to make highly available increases, complexity and cost of an availability solution will also increase. Now the good news is, is that we have advances in virtualization technology, which enable organizations to use virtual computers as hot, warm, or even cold spares. Virtual computers may be suitable to provide the same functionality. Virtualization can provide flexibility and cost efficiency. However, you must verify that a virtual machine has the capacity to handle the load of the physical computer that it may be replacing. So again, high availability is important, it can be costly, you have to figure out the benefit against the expense if you have a failure, and then find the right solution for you.

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