SQL Server on a Cluster Experiences Mike FITZSIMON SYSTEMSARCHITECT F ITZSIMON IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Why use SQL Server on a Cluster? High Availability Fault Tolerance (?) Failback Manageability Scalability (?)
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Hardware Architecture – Single Tier Web Server Business Logic COM Components SQL Server
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Hardware Architecture – Two Tier SQL Server Database Server Web Server Business Logic COM Components
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Hardware Architecture – Three Tier SQL Server Database Server Business Logic COM Components Web Server
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Hardware Architecture – Scalable Three Tier SQL Server Database Server Application Server Farm Web Server Farm
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD H/w Architecture - OzEvents.com Router distributes http requests 2-Server Web Farm (Test site on one server) SQL Server (Production & Test databases) Exchange Server
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Hardware Architecture – Scalable Three Tier SQL Server Database Server Single point of failure? Application Server Farm Web Server Farm
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Server AServer B LAN Hardware Architecture - Cluster Server Two or more Servers Private LAN (heartbeat, <500ms ping) Shared SCSI bus (separate to System SCSI bus) Applications & Data on RAID Private LAN RAID Applications & Data Shared SCSI SCSI
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD IMS Locations Brisbane Sydney Melbourne Cluster Servers in each State Office Frame Relay Service
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD High Availability Cluster Servers IBM Netfinity 5500 Servers Physical machines named \\Heaven and \\Hell Virtual machines named \\BneSQL and \\BneIIS Required 4 IP addresses !
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD High Availability Cluster Servers RAID-1 Mirrored internal disk drives Can be used as an emergency backup during a system upgrade
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD High Availability Cluster Servers External RAID array StorageTek Raid-1 9Gb Quorum Disk (persistent arbitration) Raid-5 18 Gb Data disks
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD High Availability Cluster Servers External RAID array: Dual Power supplies Dual Network adaptors
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Server AServer B LAN Hardware Architecture - Cluster Server Normal Active/Active configuration Server A: IIS & MTS Resource Groups Server B: SQL Resource Group Web pages and SQL MDF files on RAID Private LAN RAID Applications & Data Shared SCSI SCSI
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Multi-Node Clusters Still need only two NICs per machine (one for public network, one for private network) Need a Hub To support at least 4-nodes, need Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition Windows Clustering is installed by default; configure a cluster by starting Cluster Administrator or Cluster.exe
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Writing your own Cluster-Aware Application LooksAlive (By default, SQL calls this every 5 seconds) IsAlive (By default, SQL calls this every 60 seconds)
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Clustering Resources Quorum Drive Configuration Information Available Features in Windows Server 2003 Clusters Step by step guide to install a 2000 Cluster: nfo/planning/server/clustersteps.asp
Fitzsimon IT C ONSULTING PTY LTD Questions Mike Fitzsimon This ppt available from