Server Help

[Jcirax1]

Ok I'm a newbie when it comes to servers so let me explain our situation and what I need:

 

We have several offices around West Africa. So very hot, humid, lots of Saharan dust frequent power outages and surges.

 

We have one central location that houses our current server, just a Lenovo desktop with lots of room, and then every workstation is networked to it. We have backup batteries and gensets to counter the power outages. Our main server is also backed up here in the US and then backed up again to Amazon Cloud

I do have a server tower but we aren't using it. I need to set up a fool proof rig that if the main server goes down, then I could swap it out with another and a third if that one fails too.

 

Any help, suggestions and constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated!

[Electronics Wizardy]

What os are you running? You can make clusters pretty easy, but it really depends on os and app support.

[Jcirax1]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What os are you running? You can make clusters pretty easy, but it really depends on os and app support.

It's Windows Server 2008 R2

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Jcirax1 said:

It's Windows Server 2008 R2

what are you doing on it? Domain? file server?

 

You can cluster domain servers pretty easily, and use dfs to cluster storage

 

Id upgrade to server 2019 though, 2008r2 is gonna be out of support pretty soon.

[Jcirax1]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what are you doing on it? Domain? file server?

 

You can cluster domain servers pretty easily, and use dfs to cluster storage

 

Id upgrade to server 2019 though, 2008r2 is gonna be out of support pretty soon.

It's a file server and our POS system is on it.

We can upgrade if needed.

I have no idea what a cluster storage is tho

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Jcirax1 said:

It's a file server and our POS system is on it.

We can upgrade if needed.

I have no idea what a cluster storage is tho

cluster is when one system fails anouther system will automatically take its place.

 

You might want to look into running this on vms, makes it much easier to migrate between servers.

[Jcirax1]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

cluster is when one system fails anouther system will automatically take its place.

 

You might want to look into running this on vms, makes it much easier to migrate between servers.

One more question, sorry for being a newbie, what's a VMS?

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, Jcirax1 said:

One more question, sorry for being a newbie, what's a VMS?

virtual machines.

 

You might want to get someone to help you with managing IT.