* 'Novell Cluster Services for Linux and NetWare'
When you walk in to your local bookstore, can you still find the NetWare section? Don’t bother looking though as there hasn’t been a “NetWare” section for perhaps a dozen years – if ever there was one. Still, the occasional NetWare book does get published but these days, it’s mostly Novell Press doing the publishing. I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across “Novell Cluster Services for Linux and NetWare,” just recently published by Novell Press.
The book is written by experienced trainers Sander van Vugt and Rob Bastiaansen. Bastiaansen also wrote “The Netware Toolbox: 100 Tips And Tricks For Your Netware Environment,” another book you should have.
Not everyone will have a need, or desire for clustered servers. But before deciding that clustering is not for you, you might read an online sample chapter from the new book, “Designing a Clustering Solution for Linux and NetWare with Novell Cluster Services”. This chapter is broken into four sections:
1. Cluster Design Guidelines
2. Creating a Failover Matrix
3. Application-Specific Design Guidelines
4. Clustering Without Shared Storage
The book gives you a great overview of clustering as well as show the potential costs (and benefits) involved. If you decide clustering is what you need to ensure high availability of your network, then buy the book and get a thorough grounding in clustering technology before committing the time and expense you’ll need for the actual implementation. Like many other networking tasks, clustering is 90% planning and only 10% rollout.
This isn’t the first time Bastiaansen’s name has graced the pages of this newsletter (see “Help arrives for VMware users”) and hopefully it isn’t the last. You might also want to check out Bastiaansen’s tips page. Although it’s not exclusively filled with NetWare-related items, it certainly has some useful tidbits.
