Server farms
A typical server farm contains at least two standalone servers and/or standalone servers and at least one cluster:
A single NAS Manager manages every server and cluster within the server farm. The NAS Manager hosts the management network for the server farm and provides quorum services for up to eight clusters. Managed devices must be located in a single data center, not distributed across a campus or metropolitan area network.
The server farm offers the following functionality:
- Optimizing performance. For maximum throughput, migrate EVSs to a higher-end server or to a fully dedicated server.
- Balancing load. For more efficient use of available resources, migrate heavily used EVSs to less busy servers or to higher-end servers that support greater capacity.
- Redundant failover. In the event of a catastrophic failure of any standalone server, the EVSs hosted by the failed server can be brought online on any other server or cluster in the server farm.
When configured together as a server farm, standalone servers and cluster nodes share common access to the same storage subsystem, ensuring that when EVSs move from one node to another, whether due to an automatic failover or manual migration of EVSs among servers, the target server has access to the storage served by the EVS.