Question on Hardware failover of the MS SQL Server 2000 DB

12 May 2005 3:18 PM

Mangesh Deshpande

Hi

We are planning to purchase powervault 220 S which provides us a clustering
mode.

We can see the hard drives from both the machines hooked up to the powervault.

I want to achieve machine level failovermachine hooked to the powervault
when the first machine goes down. Since both the machines can see the hard
drives lets say machine A ( primary goes down) I want machine B(failover ) to
start using the hard drives. The sql server installation on Machine B is
passive and is configured with the same drive names as Primary so there.
I am not worried about the IP's as we can change that in application but if
someone knows of similar command like IFCONFIG on unix to create virtual IP's
let me know.

Let me know if anyone has tried this. I had this solution with Oracle in
production and had worked but I am not sure what could be different in SQL
server on Sun Solaris.

Tks
Mangesh

12 May 2005 3:41 PM

Geoff N. Hiten

This is pretty much the essence of failover clustering in SQL 2000. Two
machines with connectivity to a single data store but only one machine (host
node) actually controlling the data at a time. The cluster service handles
the monitoring and failover. IP addresses and network names are virtualized
so they follow the data and application during a failover.

Now for the bad news, SCSI clusters are not nearly as reliable as Fibre
Channel connected clusters. They also perform much slower than
non-clustered SCSI SQL servers due to the requirement to disable controller
write cache. Finally, clusters must be certified by the vendor, not just
cobbled together from semi-random parts if you want to get any kind of
support. Dell does sell certified cluster solutions.

Geoff N. Hiten
Microsoft SQL Server MVP

Show quote

"Mangesh Deshpande" <MangeshDeshpa***@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:4100F001-4922-4E05-A1A2-A45EE11F5045@microsoft.com...
> Hi
>
> We are planning to purchase powervault 220 S which provides us a
> clustering
> mode.
>
> We can see the hard drives from both the machines hooked up to the
> powervault.
>
> I want to achieve machine level failovermachine hooked to the powervault
> when the first machine goes down. Since both the machines can see the
> hard
> drives lets say machine A ( primary goes down) I want machine B(failover )
> to
> start using the hard drives. The sql server installation on Machine B is
> passive and is configured with the same drive names as Primary so there.
> I am not worried about the IP's as we can change that in application but
> if
> someone knows of similar command like IFCONFIG on unix to create virtual
> IP's
> let me know.
>
> Let me know if anyone has tried this. I had this solution with Oracle in
> production and had worked but I am not sure what could be different in SQL
> server on Sun Solaris.
>
> Tks
> Mangesh