Hardware for Clustered Server

  • We are a mid shop using SQL as backend for 2 mission crital applications. An application is using SQL 2000 on an HP DL380 and the other app is using SQL 2005 on an ML570. The SQL databases are customized from the vendors and there is nothing I can touch inside. The company lately was sold from private ower to a group of investers. The new owner wanted to make SQL available 24/7 even they know that only management users work after hours and they for sure don't work after midnight. There are couple things I hope you can give me feedbacks:

    1. If I have a 2-node clustered windows server 2003 environment, is it possbile to cluster a SQL 2005 instance and a SQL 2000 instance from the above scenario? Like I install a SQL 200 instance and a SQL 2005 intance on one node and setup the cluster with other node

    2. Since we would like to stay with HP, which HP server model do you have if you are using clustered SQL in your environment?

    Thanks for you inputs.

    Regards

  • It is possible to have SQL2k and SQL2k5 running under two virtual servers in a cluster. It's something we have used temporarily during in-place upgrades, although we've never run a production system for more than a week in that configuration.

    You'd need to test things to make sure that the "common files" (MDAC, etc.) don't cause you issues. I'd suggest installing the SQL2k virtual server first and getting that fully patched to the patch-level you want to run in prod, then do the SQL2k5 installation to a separate virtual server.

    As far as the hardware goes, that depends mainly on how paranoid your business is. In the (second) worst-case you'll have both virtual servers running on the same physical server. That should happen well under 1% of the time, in fact <0.1% should be achievable even with what looks a bit cludgy, but that still adds up to over 8 hours a year.

    If you want full performance for that 8 hours then you need something grunty enough to run both virtual servers without impact, so the sum of the processors in the current servers and the sum of the RAM in the current servers, in both cases plus a bit extra for comfort/growth. If you can wear some performance degradation then you can reduce these somewhat. The main thing I'd insist on is plenty of memory.

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