We just rebooted our WSS 3.0 servers for patching, and since the patch had a problem, our Sharepoint instance was unavailable to users for almost three hours. Now we need to redesign our setup so that patches don't incur any downtime in the future (i.e. users can access sharepoint through Server A when Server B is being patched, and vice versa).
Our current layout consists of:
- 1 Server that runs Central administration and serves as the app server / WFE
- 1 Server that runs the SQL db
Adding more servers is no problem: I figured we could just add two more servers that clone these roles and we should be good to go. However, I was told you can't duplicate the Central Administration server, so users will always be unable to access Sharepoint when you patch that server.
Is this true? How do we make our WSS 3.0 farm highly available?
Thanks!
How