I would have given you some points if I could. RackMonkey is really a good solution. Although I don't know if it scales to the point where questioner needs it.

We would have taken this software but there was only one problem. We have several devices (like e.g. firewalls) which are only "1/2 U". Meaning we have two devices next to each other. And this could not be represented at the time when we evaluated the software.

Since when is it possible to have an Active/Active cluster? Definitely not with Microsoft Cluster Server from Microsoft 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cluster_Server

And as I wrote in my article I am only writing about this one. And I was not talking about "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003" or the NLB feature.

And about the vmware solution: He could create a snapshot of the running vm then copy the disk file(s) over to the other server and then delete the snapshot again. This whole process can be scripted with perl and RCLI. He only needs two ESXi servers for this. And they can be downloaded for free. It is definitely not the best solutions but one that would work.

And yes, your solution is probably the best one for his problem.

Please look at http://www.drbd.org/home/mirroring/ and the next chapter "Recovery".

I hope hope this can help you already little.

True, sorry I did not write it that clear. I was only writing about the Cluster software included with Windows. Not about other applications like NLB included with Windows too.

I just wanted to make clear that Microsoft Cluster Server is a lot easier to set-up (what the questioner has seen correctly) but this is because you get a lot less. He would have to install and configure several other applications (like NLB) to get the same as he gets with Linux HA.

I want to give you some more information. Based on your visitor estimates I think you do not have a lot of knowledge about it. Because for this number of visitors you do not really need a cluster.

But now to the other stuff. Yes, Windows clustering is (up to Win Server 2003 [1]) a lot easier. But this is because it is not really a cluster. The only thing you can do is having the software running on one server, then you stop it and start it on the new server. This is what Windows Cluster is doing for you. But you can not have the software running on both servers at the same time.

If you really want to have a cluster then you need probably some sort of shared storage (FibreChannel, iSCSI, etc.). Or you are going to use something like DRDB [2]. You will need something like this too if you want to have a real cluster on Windows.

I recommend you to read some more on the Linux HA website [3]. Then you get a better idea what components (shared storage, load balancer, etc.) you will need within your cluster.

If you only want high availability and not load balancing then I recommend you to not use Windows Cluster. Better set-up two VMware servers with one virtual machine and then copy a snapshot of your virtual machine every few hours over to the second machine.

[1] I don't know about Win Server 2008
[2] http://www.drbd.org/
[3] http://www.linux-ha.org/

I can only recommend this one too... I have to evaluate a new trouble ticket system last week. And of all the open source products I found this one was the best.

We had OTRS before. OTRS is very good too, but really hard to install.

A friend is using RT. Now with the newest version the user interface looks really good too. And I think many problems mentioned by others are gone.