The design and architecture of the Microsoft Cluster Service-a practical approach to high-availability and scalability

摘要

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) extends the Win-dows NT operating system tosupport high-availability services. The goal is to offer an executionenvironment where off-the-shelf server applications can continue to operate,even in the presence of node failures. Later ver-sions of MSCS will providescalability via a node and application management system that allowsapplications to scale to hundreds of nodes. This paper provides a de-taileddescription of the MSCS architecture and the de-sign decisions that have driventhe implementation of the service. The paper also describes how some majorappli-cations use the MSCS features, and describes features added to make iteasier to implement and manage fault-tolerant applications on MSCS.