Cheap mans clustering

Hi all,
This question could be posted in several different groups, but this is the
chosen one.
We plan to do High Availability in the coming financial year and have
budgetary constraints.
If I can detail the setup.
The SQL will have transactional replication, snapshot replication, and
merge replication! I cannot for the life of me see how replication can be
viable (or compatible) in a failover or clustering scenario. We will not
have a SAN (too expensive). We will have a NAS, but my understanding is
that will ask for trouble. I thought that for this to work, the databases
would have to be on a SAN.
Furthermore we will not have the budget for a proper SQL clustering
solution, so thrirdparty is likely. XOSoft seems to be the primary
candidate.
Comments are welcome, personally I don't like the sound of it. I would
however appreciate knowig how SQL replication still works on the
cluster/failover scenarios.
Many thx
PaulRunning SQL Server on NAS is no way to achieve high availability! In
most cases NAS isn't even supported and is definitely not recommended,
except maybe for a non-critical, low throughput database. The following
article gives MS's official line on this, my own advice is: don't go
there.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304261
Replication is commonly used as a low-budget alternative to clustering,
however you may also want to take a look at Database Mirroring in SQL
Server 2005. Unlike clustering, mirroring doesn't require any special
hardware.
David Portas
SQL Server MVP
--|||Oooohhh. Don't do NAS with SQL.
Your are looking for inexpensive? I assume the cost of SQL Clustering or
log shipping is in the SQL Enterprise license and you are going with
Standard. However, You can write your own version of Log shipping using
SQL standard. It's really just coping over the Tlogs to another server and
restoring. Have a DNS entry that abstracts the SQL Server name and failover
can be performed quickly. There's a little more to it if you want logins
and such but it's not that bad.
Danny
"Paul Buxton" <paul@.nospamspireite.ndo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1vebb4usw7c62.14jpupfkmyvi6.dlg@.40tude.net...
> Hi all,
> This question could be posted in several different groups, but this is the
> chosen one.
> We plan to do High Availability in the coming financial year and have
> budgetary constraints.
> If I can detail the setup.
>
> The SQL will have transactional replication, snapshot replication, and
> merge replication! I cannot for the life of me see how replication can be
> viable (or compatible) in a failover or clustering scenario. We will not
> have a SAN (too expensive). We will have a NAS, but my understanding is
> that will ask for trouble. I thought that for this to work, the databases
> would have to be on a SAN.
> Furthermore we will not have the budget for a proper SQL clustering
> solution, so thrirdparty is likely. XOSoft seems to be the primary
> candidate.
> Comments are welcome, personally I don't like the sound of it. I would
> however appreciate knowig how SQL replication still works on the
> cluster/failover scenarios.
> Many thx
> Paul|||Lemme guess, your management is the type to buy the dummy security cameras
and signs and think that it is "just like the real thing" but lots cheaper?
What you have outlined is not a highly available design. It is a
low-availability system pretending to be a high-availability plan. SQL on
NAS does give you two nifty features for one low price; low performance AND
low-availability.
You might look at Peer-to-Peer replication using SQL 2005 as an availability
option. There is a risk of some small data loss during a failure event,
but no more than with XOSoft. Database mirroring has several options
depending on hw much data loss is tolerable and how automatic you want the
failover. Of course, the tighter the constraints, the higher the
performance impact.
The short version is that High Availability isn't cheap no matter how it is
implemented. It takes a combination of people, process, and technology to
achieve a true HA system. If your employers want to skimp on one part, I
suspect they will not invest in the other two elements either.
Geoff N. Hiten
Senior Database Administrator
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
"Paul Buxton" <paul@.nospamspireite.ndo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1vebb4usw7c62.14jpupfkmyvi6.dlg@.40tude.net...
> Hi all,
> This question could be posted in several different groups, but this is the
> chosen one.
> We plan to do High Availability in the coming financial year and have
> budgetary constraints.
> If I can detail the setup.
>
> The SQL will have transactional replication, snapshot replication, and
> merge replication! I cannot for the life of me see how replication can be
> viable (or compatible) in a failover or clustering scenario. We will not
> have a SAN (too expensive). We will have a NAS, but my understanding is
> that will ask for trouble. I thought that for this to work, the databases
> would have to be on a SAN.
> Furthermore we will not have the budget for a proper SQL clustering
> solution, so thrirdparty is likely. XOSoft seems to be the primary
> candidate.
> Comments are welcome, personally I don't like the sound of it. I would
> however appreciate knowig how SQL replication still works on the
> cluster/failover scenarios.
> Many thx
> Paul|||In addition to the other posts, below gives a good comparison of pros and co
ns between the three
available technologies for SQL Server 2000:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...oy/sqlhalp.mspx
Tibor Karaszi, SQL Server MVP
http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/default.asp
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com/
Blog: http://solidqualitylearning.com/blogs/tibor/
"Paul Buxton" <paul@.nospamspireite.ndo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1vebb4usw7c62.14jpupfkmyvi6.dlg@.40tude.net...
> Hi all,
> This question could be posted in several different groups, but this is the
> chosen one.
> We plan to do High Availability in the coming financial year and have
> budgetary constraints.
> If I can detail the setup.
>
> The SQL will have transactional replication, snapshot replication, and
> merge replication! I cannot for the life of me see how replication can be
> viable (or compatible) in a failover or clustering scenario. We will not
> have a SAN (too expensive). We will have a NAS, but my understanding is
> that will ask for trouble. I thought that for this to work, the databases
> would have to be on a SAN.
> Furthermore we will not have the budget for a proper SQL clustering
> solution, so thrirdparty is likely. XOSoft seems to be the primary
> candidate.
> Comments are welcome, personally I don't like the sound of it. I would
> however appreciate knowig how SQL replication still works on the
> cluster/failover scenarios.
> Many thx
> Paul