Creating a Backup Operating System

If your server appliance will support the ability to failover to a backup copy of the operating system, you must create a backup operating system.

To create a backup operating system, you must first create a primary partition for the backup operating system according to requirements outlined in Partitioning, Formatting, and Installing the Main Disk. After setting the backup operating system partition to be active, you install and configure Windows Server 2003 as described in Operating System Configuration, and then install and configure any other software you want to run (such as the Server Appliance Kit frameworks) when the computer starts using the backup operating system.

Note

• The backup operating system receives the same computer name as the primary operating system. During setup, this computer must not be made part of a domain because the duplicate-name structure required for the reliability feature will be rejected by the Microsoft® Active Directory directory service of Microsoft Windows. Instead, set up the computer as part of a workgroup.

In order to use the failover functionality of the Reliability Services, use the table below to add the appropriate value to the registry of each operating-system partition under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\vmnvram\Parameters.

When these registry values are set, a critical alert will be raised on the Web UI and local UI when the system starts using the backup operating system.