Cluster Solutions

[jblanton]

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forum so please excuse me in advance for my feebleness. I just started a new job and they are interested in mirroring their fileserver and also having it failback in case of hardware/software crash. I'm not really sure of the exact difference between failover and failback but to be clear we want to set it so that if one crashes the other can immediately take its name and ip and handle all business as usual. I at first was looking into softwares like Doubletake and and Peersync. Well then someone had to go and bring up maybe we could cluster it and save ourselves some money. Myself being completely new to clustering headed straight for google. Now heres my problem. Clustering is confusing. We have one machine that is Windows 2003 Server Enterprise and have ordered an identical machine. I work for a digital imaging company and this is the fileserevr for our important image files that are transfered daily and NOT our user shares so we don't have to worry to much about open files. My question is this. Are we able to set up a Mirrored/Failback cluster between 2 identical servers, which both have 2 network cards, WITHOUT a shared network storage inbetween and what would be the best place to look for instructions on setup of this? I did some reading and apparently Win2k3 Enterprise has MSCS on it by default but there are so many different clustering setups and terms that I'm really not confident trying it without being very clear on what exactly im doing. So if anyone could shed some light on this for me whether I want HA, DFS, or NLB, clustering or if this setup is even possible I would be forever grateful. I hope I have given you all the information you need.

 

[mrdenny]

First without shared storage clustering won't work. Setting up a cluster requires shared storage.

You will probably want to use doubletake, or neverfail, or something along those lines were all the data is replicated from one machine to another as changes are saved.

DFS may work for you as well as it can replicate data from one server to another.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

 

[jblanton]

I was under the impression that DFS would just be a "redirecting" tool for server names and paths, but haven't used it for a very long time. Does it now have the capability to mirror/replicate servers? and if so can it be done in real time? Thank you very much for your input.

 

[mrdenny]

I beleive that it does. Check with the forum931 folks. I'm a DBA, not an SA.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

 

[itmasterz]

You might want to look in XO soft which is now CA. But r2 is great as well. Just not for sql and obv exchange.