In my previous company I had the dubious pleasure of setting up MSCS. It was a two-node active-passive cluster. The two nodes were identical and shared a fibre-channel disk array. Here are the specs:
Quad Pentium 500 MHz Pentium Xeon's
1 GB memory
6 disk array, three logical mirrored drives.
MS Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition
MS SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition.
It should be noted that you must have two NT Server licenses and two SQL Server licenses. If you want to do an active-active cluster it requires four licenses. The Enterprise Editions of these software packages was much more expensive than their standard counterparts. You can not use standard editions for clustering.
Installing cluster services was very easy. The Cluster Manager app was OK outside of the occasional hangs. (Although the manager app hung, the operations were completed, such as failover, failback.)
In order to do active-active clustering you must have two shared storage devices; the active node will only be able to access the shared storage it "owns".
SQL Server installed all right if you followed the MS White Paper exactly. I don't know why, but installation order was important; if you didn't follow it it didn't work.
Applying service packs was extremely painful. The instructions were straightforward but did not work. MS provided us with a program that backed out the SP snafu, which worked somewhat. If it weren't for google we'd have been dead.
MS support is useless IMO. No contracts just pay-by-incident. Have a credit card handy before you do any upgrades of any kind. You will most likely need it.
As long as the cluster was just doing SQL server, it worked great. Failover was seamless. Given the proper hardware, Windows behaved well. Make sure that you only attempt this with certified hardware. Very important.
Once we started adding third party reporting software things started to go bad. Adding it to the cluster services was remarkably easy. However, even though the servers had quad procs and a good amount of memory, simultaneous report requests ground the system to a halt. SQL Server behaved well, around 25% of CPU at most even in heavy load. The reports (JRE) would take up over 50% of the CPU in light load. Very bogus IMO.
A lot of third party apps do not support MS Clustering. Lot's of tweaking to get them to work.
If I were to do it again, I think I would not have used MSCS, but instead have two distinct systems that had some kind of data replication software.
This configuration is also limited to a two node cluster. Although you can run an active-active cluster the instances of SQL Server would be seperate. The data storage areas cannot be shared between the two nodes.
Although I prefer UNIX I try not to be an MS bigot. It does certain things well. I hope that clustering has improved with w2k.
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Quad Pentium 500 MHz Pentium Xeon's
1 GB memory
6 disk array, three logical mirrored drives.
MS Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition
MS SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition.
It should be noted that you must have two NT Server licenses and two SQL Server licenses. If you want to do an active-active cluster it requires four licenses. The Enterprise Editions of these software packages was much more expensive than their standard counterparts. You can not use standard editions for clustering.
Installing cluster services was very easy. The Cluster Manager app was OK outside of the occasional hangs. (Although the manager app hung, the operations were completed, such as failover, failback.)
In order to do active-active clustering you must have two shared storage devices; the active node will only be able to access the shared storage it "owns".
SQL Server installed all right if you followed the MS White Paper exactly. I don't know why, but installation order was important; if you didn't follow it it didn't work.
Applying service packs was extremely painful. The instructions were straightforward but did not work. MS provided us with a program that backed out the SP snafu, which worked somewhat. If it weren't for google we'd have been dead.
MS support is useless IMO. No contracts just pay-by-incident. Have a credit card handy before you do any upgrades of any kind. You will most likely need it.
As long as the cluster was just doing SQL server, it worked great. Failover was seamless. Given the proper hardware, Windows behaved well. Make sure that you only attempt this with certified hardware. Very important.
Once we started adding third party reporting software things started to go bad. Adding it to the cluster services was remarkably easy. However, even though the servers had quad procs and a good amount of memory, simultaneous report requests ground the system to a halt. SQL Server behaved well, around 25% of CPU at most even in heavy load. The reports (JRE) would take up over 50% of the CPU in light load. Very bogus IMO.
A lot of third party apps do not support MS Clustering. Lot's of tweaking to get them to work.
If I were to do it again, I think I would not have used MSCS, but instead have two distinct systems that had some kind of data replication software.
This configuration is also limited to a two node cluster. Although you can run an active-active cluster the instances of SQL Server would be seperate. The data storage areas cannot be shared between the two nodes.
Although I prefer UNIX I try not to be an MS bigot. It does certain things well. I hope that clustering has improved with w2k.