Best practices for managing clustered test environments. (Enterprise Networking).

A good read on testing of the clustered environments:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Best+practices+for+managing+clustered+test+environments.+(Enterprise...-a0105884208

"Today, companies are challenged to satisfy the business needs of demanding customers by providing quality applications and high levels of performance in an increasingly complex hardware and software environment. Pressure from strong competition and flat or shrinking IT budgets are compounding the situation. IT executives are searching for the best methods and tools to help them achieve the right balance between delivering reliability and performance for applications and systems that must be available 24x7.

One common solution for achieving this balance in supporting large scale, high-volume enterprise systems is to implement various clustering configurations that manage applications, hardware and databases effectively. Clustering is simply a way to physically and logically group hardware and software resources to work together as one system, and there are a variety of clustering configurations that allow for load balancing The fine tuning of a computer system, network or disk subsystem in order to more evenly distribute the data and/or processing across available resources. For example, in clustering, load balancing might distribute the incoming transactions evenly to all servers, or it might redirect them among the hardware, software and database resources. Clustering effectively improves processing efficiency and performance, while reducing operating costs operating costs npl → gastos mpl operacionales , especially for large enterprise scale, mission-critical systems. "