Abstract: A method and apparatus for prioritizing provisioning data within a provisioning server. The prioritized provisioning data may be used to provision a target server in accordance with the prioritization.

Abstract: Embodiments of the invention are directed to a method and apparatus of balancing a load among a plurality of servers in a computer system. The method includes determining an estimated load value for an action as the action is being initiated, forwarding the estimated load value to a load balancer, and using the estimated load value to balance the load.

Abstract: A method and apparatus that provides informed prefetching and enhanced memory utilization in a server cluster to improve failover and startup time of a resource group executed by a server cluster. When starting up or failing over a resource group on a given server, the method identifies information for prefetching, informs a file system executed by the server cluster of the identified information, accesses the identified information using the file system, and stores the identified information in main memory for use by the server in the server cluster in advance of when the server actually will need the identified information to failover or initiate resources. To enhance memory utilization the method also identifies pages in cache memory that are not needed for current services provided by a server. Generally these pages contain prefetched information that was already used at start up or failover of a resource group.