| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
jaxdave
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
USA
2426 Posts
Status: offline |
 Posted - 09/12/2011 : 2:14:45 PM
|
I figured I would ask prior to collecting up technet webinars to watch etc.
Does anyone have some webinars,article etc that you found helpful when looking at developing an enterprise multinode cluster environment? We have around 170 SQL production servers with numerous more in SDLC that we are going to be consolidating. Microsoft or a partner will be engaged at some point but right now we are just trying to ramp up on our understanding.
cheers,
Dave
|
Edited by - jaxdave on 09/12/2011 2:20:46 PM |
|
|
NMDANGE
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
USA
2054 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 09/12/2011 : 3:28:09 PM
|
I have only done 2-node Active/Passive SQL clusters, but here's what I know about multinode clusters.
Only 1 SQL instance in the cluster can be the default instance. If you have never used a named instance of SQL before, this will be a change from the way you do it now. Instead of connecting to "sqlcluster", you have to do "sqlcluster\instancename".
You must always have at least one passive node in your cluster. So for 2 instances, you'd want 3 nodes (2 active, 1 passive). Technically you can go up to 16 nodes in one cluster I believe, but not sure what a best practice is for recommended number of nodes per cluster.
Some thoughts:
You might be able to use Hyper-V with virtual SQL servers to consolidate the number of physical servers without impacting configuration.
You can run multiple databases within 1 SQL server instance. Many applications work just fine on a shared SQL Server. I have 180+ databases sharing 1 SQL instance (8 cpu cores and 64gb RAM) without any performance issues. Though admittedly many of them are extremely small web applications. |
Michael D'Angelo
(former)MVP-MIIS, Pace University Senior Systems Administrator (Windows)
(MS)NMDANGE
PhoeniX WorX Systems Administrator. If you play Total Annihilation, please join us. http://www.phoenixworx.org |
 |
|
|
Curt
Moderator
USA
6649 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 09/12/2011 : 4:33:01 PM
|
I don't know Michael, that's a lot of different personalities in one room, for a SQL instance.
As we know power and memory and DISK I/O only go so far in supporting different types of databases. MSFT recommends some apps have their own servers. For instance a heavy SSRS server would best be on a separate server. Given the types of authentication between SSRS, Application servers and the SQL servers I would be more comfortable with multiple SQL servers and VMWARE or Hyper-V with some failover.
But then again I'm only an "OK" DBA, and the more things I see going wrong the more I learn.
/:>
|
Curt Spanburgh
Microsoft Certified Business Solution Specialist.
Dynamics CRM MVP
Contributing Editor, Windows IT Pro
He that is walking with wise persons will become wise, but he that is having dealings with the stupid ones will fare badly.
Proverbs 13:20
|
|
|
|
NMDANGE
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
USA
2054 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 09/13/2011 : 10:22:00 AM
|
Oh sure, we have a separate SQL Server for our BI data warehouse, and a few other applications that need it. Certainly I monitor performance, but we've never had any issues. The SQL Server cluster itself is pretty "big" and with a good amount of disks behind it. It's big enough that when we move off of SQL 2005 completely onto SQL 2008, our SQL 2005 cluster is going to become a Hyper-V cluster. So many of the applications we have use very minimal resources it's such a waste to create an entire virtual machine just for that one database. Of course when the application wants "sa" access, the answer is just simply no. An application can only access their own database and nothing else. (Except for SharePoint, alas)
Also in regards to high availability, a SQL Server cluster is going to have much shorter failover times compared to a single virtual machine running in VMWare HA.
I was actually looking at the databases on the server, and though there are technically 180 databases, there are less than 15 actual applications. (7 Microsoft apps - Lync, SharePoint, SCOM, SCCM, SCVMM, WSUS, Team Foundation Server). But SharePoint alone has a ton of databases just by itself. Lync and TFS also have a bunch. Then there's the BES database, vCenter, and some other 3rd party applications that are not too big. The rest are all for inhouse web apps. And most of these "apps" are just rarely used web forms that take data, save it in a database, and spit out a report. |
Michael D'Angelo
(former)MVP-MIIS, Pace University Senior Systems Administrator (Windows)
(MS)NMDANGE
PhoeniX WorX Systems Administrator. If you play Total Annihilation, please join us. http://www.phoenixworx.org |
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
SQL 2008 multinode clustering?
