August 6, 2004 at 7:55 am
Hello,
I am wondering if anyone has any experience working with SQL Server installed on to servers that are in a Network Load Balancing cluster. Does this cause any problems?
I am looking at installing two Windows 2003 Standard servers running an application that needs to failover (hence the NLB).One server will be a primary, the other secondary (only used in case of a failure of the first server). Each of these servers will also be running SQL Server, with transactional replication between the two. The NLB application will connect to the local SQL Server via a DSN, so in the case of a failover, the secondary server will connect to its local database and run.
I'm used to regular Windows and SQL Clustering, so I don't know if the above scenario will cause any problems.
I've also heard that it's possible to use NLB and merge replication to actually balance the load between two SQL Servers. I don't know if this would work with the front-end application, but it sounds interesting.
If anyone has experience with either of the above, I'd love to hear about it!
Thanks,
Chris
August 6, 2004 at 8:30 am
we support several systems that fall into these categories.
you were wondering if your front end application will work with a clustered active/active (load balancing) solution - most likely yes, as the front end doen't have anything to do with the the database server internal processes.
you can set up two types of clustering Active/Active and Active/Passive - the first is the load balance type scenario.
unfortunatley this option requires twice the licencing cost. Pure failover clustering requires only one SQL liscence.
see http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/faq.asp for more details on clustering liscences
MVDBA
August 6, 2004 at 8:51 am
Thanks for your ideas, but maybe I didn't really explain very well.
The application is an in-house developed application that is not cluster aware. I am not going to run MSCS, just NLB. Since the application is running on the same server as the NLB application, I was thinking of using Multicasting network adapters (vs. Unicasting), so that the SQL Servers would be addressable outside of the NLB IP ADDR/MAC ADDR.
I was wondering if NLB would interfere with SQL in any way, since I've usually used NLB merely as a web farm for IIS servers, and used MSCS and SQL Server Clustering for the database servers. It sounds like everything should be OK, but you know how those gotchas pop up with SQL (and especailly and kind of clustering).
Chris
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