October 7, 2010 at 3:16 am
I've been asked to build an Active/Active/Passive SQL 2008 R2 Cluster for our OLTP setup, and an Active/Active setup for Analysis Services.
I'm trying to find some examples of an Active/Active/Passive cluster and it doesn't seem to be a very common setup as I can't find much at all. Is this kind of setup generally frowned upon?
In regard to Reporting Services, from my understanding, it isn't cluster aware, so how is Reporting Services generally handled within a cluster environment?
Thanks in advance for any help.
October 7, 2010 at 6:05 am
I wouldnt say Active/Active/Passive is frowned upon, it just isnt common. I set one of these up for my previous company as by virtue of legacy reasons their production server had 2 instances installed and this lent itself nicely to the Active/Active/Passive setup so that I could separate the instances for performance, keep them on the same virtual host and give them both a large injection of high availability.
Setting it up is identical to an Active/Passive setup except you add a third node and have to install SQL Server 6 times (twice on each node). If this is a windows 2008 cluster you will need to have at least 3 shared disks. One for MSDTC and at least one for each SQL install; Quorum disk is not required for an odd number cluster in 2k8. I opted for this configuration as it was recommended by our SAN supplier to allow the intelligence in the SAN to manage disk IO and move the logs and tempdb as required. You could just as easily opt for 7 shared disks but its up to you and your hardware config.
Using windows 2008, hardware no longer has to be on the compatibility list to be supported by Microsoft. This makes it possible to have slightly different nodes for different roles. Such as a cheaper, lower capacity passive node if your company are happy to accept reduced performance at times of failure.
One thing to be aware of, features cannot be added to a complete cluster. If you think you may need replication, analysis services etc in the future, install them now!
You are correct about reporting services not be cluster aware. The are whitepapers and pages describing how to scale out a RS setup.
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