Designing Applications and Proper Bandwidth
What will you be running on this cluster? This is going to bring you back to planning your hardware solution appropriately. In each of the following chapters, you'll be given a set of basic requirements, which you'll need to get your job done with the solution you're implementing. Of course, when you add services on top of the cluster itself, you'll also need to consider adding resources to the hardware.
You should also consider the bandwidth connections based on the application. Bandwidth and application flows can be seen in Figure 1-16. Some services will use more bandwidth than others and this must be planned by watching application flows. In later chapters, we'll discuss how to test your clustered solutions with a network and protocol analyzer to make sure you're operating at peak performance, instead of trying to function on an oversaturated and overused network segment.
You also need to consider whether your applications are cluster aware, which means they support the cluster API (application programming interface). Applications that are cluster aware will be registered with the Cluster Service. Applications that are noncluster aware can still be failed over, but will miss out on some of the benefits of cluster-aware applications. That said, you might want to consider this if the whole reason you're clustering is for a mission-critical application that might not be cluster aware. Most of Microsoft's product line is cluster aware, but you might want to check with a vendor of a third-party solution to see if their applications function with the cluster API.
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