July 11, 2012 at 3:19 pm
I am very familiar with clustering and providing high availability solutions and I find it very useful in many ways. Now, I am in a situation to work at Cloud environment where we have our SQL Server Installed. When I talk about high availability with cluster, I got push back from our cloud expert saying I do not need to cluster my servers for high availability.
I would like to see other opinions frmm SQL Server Experts at this forum.
Can I still rely on cloud for HA (high availability) ?
Can we all just ignore the cluster at cloud environment and rely on cloud backups?
Please advice.
Thanks.
July 11, 2012 at 5:29 pm
It depends on the cloud platform. Are you talking about Windows Azure w/ SQL Database, or one of the others?
There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
--Plato
July 11, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Thank you for responding. We are not at Windows Azure, this is private cloud hosted at Dallas called iLand. Does it make any difference?
July 11, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Absolutely it makes a difference. Not all cloud solutions are created equal. With SQL Database on Windows Azure you get database redundancy as part of the platform.
In terms of database high availability I would recommend asking iLand for explicit details about how their platform would cope with a hardware outage, or a complete site outage, or database corruption, etc. Basically the things you are protecting against locally, you still need to make sure they are protecting you against those same things. Just because it is going into the cloud does not mean those requirements are magically solved. If they cannot tell you, or will not tell you, or pretend it's all magically done, then you need to look for another provider.
There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
--Plato
July 11, 2012 at 5:46 pm
They do not provide anything or our company decide not to buy extra packages at this time. But, my question is, if a server is at the cloud does it make clustering obsolete? Assuming that Clustering provides high availability, server at cloud are already in HA situation. If something goes wrong we can bring the server back quickly as cluster does. Does it make sense?
July 11, 2012 at 5:54 pm
sihaab (7/11/2012)
They do not provide anything or our company decide not to buy extra packages at this time.
Not sure what you're saying here.
But, my question is, if a server is at the cloud does it make clustering obsolete? Assuming that Clustering provides high availability, server at cloud are already in HA situation. If something goes wrong we can bring the server back quickly as cluster does. Does it make sense?
It's impossible to say. It depends on what they provide and what you're trying to protect against. If those match up then go for the cloud solution. Clustering will not protect you from bad DML operations (accidental delete, update, drop, truncate, etc.) but restoring an older backup to retrieve the lost data will. Does iLand offer you access to backups that will allow you a point-in-time recovery to retrieve lost data? Clustering protects you from some types of hardware failures, but there is some downtime involved as things failover to another node. How will iLand protect you against a hardware failure? Will the downtime be as small as you're used to with clustering? You have to list what you're protecting against, then ask iLand how they will protect you against the same issues to see if it is a comparable solution, a lesser solution, or possibly a better solution than hosting your own cluster.
There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
--Plato
July 19, 2012 at 2:06 am
But, my question is, if a server is at the cloud does it make clustering obsolete?
No
Assuming that Clustering provides high availability, server at cloud are already in HA situation. If something goes wrong we can bring the server back quickly as cluster does. Does it make sense?
Many vendors use virtualization HA solutions. These are not as good as mscs but "good enough" for many enterprises. What happends is that the server is a virtual file (or many files) and there is storage sync (or async) that copies the disk blocks that are changed over to other cluster node (or different san). I don't have much experience in it but for we are in a pilot now (With VMWare) for sharepoint solutions (documents) where the demand for integrity and availability is not as high as you would have in a transactional system. Customers can live with 1hour loss of data (we have backups every hour). So in case of a failover - our tests has shown a downtime of 5-8mins compared to clusters with 1-2 mins. But this is ok with the customer.
If any readers are familiar with the different solutions of virtualization ha please fill in.
July 19, 2012 at 3:16 am
They could be using virtual sql servers and relying upon the hyper visor HA capabilities to maintain the system uptime.
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