Hopefully this is an easy question. I am setting up a 2008 Enterprise CA cluster and need advise on how to effectively backup the clustered service. From what I've read, there are 3 menthods to backup a CA: systemstate backup via windows server backups manually right click the service and choose backup certutil -backup On our file/print cluster we setup TSM as a generic cluster service for each resource group. Regarding a Certificate Authority it appears that we would not want to backup the shared san disk but would instead need to either run a systemstate backup, or use certutil. Since this is a clustered service should we nix the systemstate backup approach and seek to perform the backup via certutil? or should we simply run the systemstate backup on both nodes?

You need to add some logic to your backup script so that you can determine which node is the active node. At the active node, I would run a combination of Windows Server Backup and Certutil -backup (or backupDB if using an HSM). At the inactive node, do not run these backups, since they shared storage drive is not connected. Brian

Brian, Thanks much for helping to lead me in the right direction.