MCSA Windows Server 2012 R2 Configuring Advanced Services Study Guide

Exam 70-412

William Panek

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118916896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Certification Guides in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

The bestselling MCSA study guide, with expert instruction and hands-on practice

MCSA Windows Server 2012 R2 Configuring Advanced Services Study Guide provides focused preparation for exam 70-412 and is fully updated to align with the latest Windows Server 2012 R2 objectives. This comprehensive guide covers 100 percent of all exam objective domains, and includes hundreds of practice questions and answers. You get access to video demonstrations, electronic flashcards, and practice exams, and hands-on exercises based on real-world scenarios allow you to apply your skills to everyday tasks. Organized by objective, each chapter includes review questions and a list of Exam Essentials that help you judge your level of preparedness every step of the way.

Exam 70-412: Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 Services is the third and final exam in the MCSA certification series, and was recently updated to cover Server R2. Additions include enhancements to Hyper-V, Storage Spaces, and Active Directory, so it's crucial that your study guide be up to date as well. This book covers the entire exam, including the new information, with expert instruction and easy-to-follow explanation that helps you to:

• Configure network services, high availability, information protection, and more
• Implement business continuity and disaster recovery solutions
• Get hands-on practice in real-world scenarios

Pass this one last exam and you become a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate – someone with trusted, demonstrated expertise in the server software with over 83 percent market share. Businesses rely on Windows Server, and the people who understand them are in demand. Thorough preparation is the key to exam success, and MCSA Windows Server 2012 R2 Configuring Advanced Services Study Guide provides all the information you need to know.

Chapter 1
Configure and Manage High Availability

THE FOLLOWING 70-412 EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:

1. 
   Configure Network Load Balancing (NLB)
   • This objective may include, but is not limited to:
     • Install NLB nodes
     • Configure NLB prerequisites
     • Configure affinity
     • Configure port rules
     • Configure cluster operation mode
     • Upgrade an NLB cluster
2. 
   Configure failover clustering
   • This objective may include, but is not limited to:
     • Configure Quorum
     • Configure cluster networking
     • Restore single node or cluster configuration
     • Configure cluster storage
     • Implement cluster aware updating
     • Upgrade a cluster
3. 
   Manage failover-clustering roles
   • This objective may include, but is not limited to:
     • Configure role-specific settings including continuously available shares
     • Configure VM monitoring
     • Configure failover and preference settings
4. 
   Manage Virtual Machine (VM) Movement
   • This objective may include, but is not limited to:
     • Configure Virtual Machine network health protection
     • Configure drain on shutdown
     • Perform quick, live and storage migrations
     • Import/export/copy of VMS

The R2 update to Windows Server 2012 has improved upon the rich high availability capabilities already present in Windows Server 2012. The management, reporting, and ease of use of the feature set are all worth mentioning, but the expansion of features is the greatest benefit of the R2 update with regard to high availability.

The exam will cover the new features at a high level, and it will cover the basic configuration and operational functions for both a failover cluster and a network load balancer. This chapter will introduce how to achieve high availability with hardware and operational changes as well as how to use the high availability features of Windows Server 2012 R2.

Any discussion of high availability, network load balancers, and clustering would not be complete without a discussion of high availability in general. The chapter will first cover what it means, both from a purely technical perspective and from a business perspective.

Components of High Availability

High availability is a buzzword that many application and hardware vendors like to throw around to get you to purchase their products. Many different options are available to achieve high availability, and there also seems to be a number of definitions and variations that help vendors sell their products as high-availability solutions.

When it comes right down to it, however, high availability simply means providing services with maximum uptime by avoiding unplanned downtime. Often, disaster recovery (DR) is also closely lumped into discussions of high availability, but DR encompasses the business and technical processes that are used to recover once a disaster has happened.

Defining a high availability plan usually starts with a service level agreement (SLA). At its most basic, an SLA defines the services and metrics that must be met for the availability and performance of an application or service. Often, an SLA is created for an IT department or service provider to deliver a specific level of service. An example of this might be an SLA for a Microsoft Exchange server. The SLA for an Exchange server might have uptime metrics on how much time during the month the mailboxes need to be available to end users, or it might define performance metrics for the amount of time it takes for email messages to be delivered.

When determining what goes into an SLA, two other factors need to be considered. However, you will often see them discussed only in the context of disaster recovery, even though they are important for designing a highly available solution. These factors are the recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO).

An RTO is the length of time an application can be unavailable before service must be restored to meet the SLA. For example, a single component failure would have an RTO of less than five minutes, and a full-site failure might have an RTO of three hours. An RPO is essentially the amount of data that must be restored in the event of a failure. For example, in a single server or component failure, the RPO would be 0, but in a site failure, the RPO might allow for up to 20 minutes of lost data.

SLAs, on the other hand, are usually expressed in percentages of the time the application is available. These percentages are also often referred to by the number of nines the percentage includes, as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Availability percentages

Availability rating	Allowed unplanned downtime/year
99 percent	3.7 days
99.9 percent	8.8 hours
99.99 percent	53 minutes
99.999 percent	5.3 minutes

Two important factors that affect an SLA are the mean time between failure (MTBF) and the mean time to recovery (MTTR). To be able to reduce the amount of unplanned downtime, the time between failures must be increased, and the time it takes to recover must be reduced. Modifying these two factors will be addressed in the next several sections of this chapter.

Achieving High Availability

Windows Server 2012 R2 is the most secure and reliable Windows version to date. It also is the most stable, mature, and capable of any version of Windows. Although similar claims have been made for previous versions of Windows Server, you can rest assured that Windows Server 2012 R2 is much better than previous versions for a variety of reasons.

An honest look at the feature set and real-world use sh...