DB mirrorring or clustering for MOSS

[web4fun]

Scenario: (My apologies for the long post)

Currently in the process of implementing MS Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) for which the backend will be running in a SQL Server 2005 Standard environment. The Sharepoint Servers and SQL servers are all running on Windows 2003 Enterprise Ed. all running on Virtual Machines (VMWare) pointing to a Netapp iSCSI SAN. Have not yet implemented VMWare's ESX 3.x HA/DRS fucntionality.

QUESTION/ADVICE:

For High Availability, we planned on utilizing the new 2005 Database Mirroring scheme with a Witness server and two SQL Servers (the primary and mirror servers) in Synchronous mode, thus the question came up about any possible issues with failover in regards to MOSS as when MOSS is installed, the database server is defined as part of the configuration so we are wondering if there would be problems in the event that the SQL Server failed over?

I have seen on other forums folks mentioning SQL aliasing, etc. but noone has said if they've actually gotten it to work with this setup. I also understand that the client side connections could be problematic depending on the application but that shouldn't be problematic in regards to MOSS should it? My apologies as I'm not a Sharepoint Admin.

Is there a recommended / suggested High Availablity scheme that Sharepoint recommends? I know that there is no perfect High Availablity solution as it would probably need a combination of software / hardware configurations to truly be as close to 100% Highly Available...but in our scenario would you think that this setup would be okay?

Again, we'd like to have Three SQL Servers (Primary, Mirror, and Witness) along with the MOSS Servers (Indexing Server, Three Web Front End Servers, etc.) for the db mirroring configuration....OR is SQL clustering the only method that is currently known will work? Just want opinions here.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mrdenny]

As far as I know MOSS isn't setup to automatically fail over to a standby mirrored server. Your best option will be to setup the SQL Server as a clustered SQL Server with one node of the cluster on each of the VM servers.

You will need to setup virtual HBAs for each VM client OS so that you can add them to the storage group on the SAN and present LUNs directly to the virtual machines not to the host VMWare ESX OS.

When you do get your VMWare HA setup through ESX setup a rule that says that the two nodes of the MOSS database servers machines can not be on the same physical piece of hardware.

Your only option (to the best of my knowledge) is you are going to use database mirroring would be via DNS alaising which would require a manual failover of the DNS name before the sharepoint site would be back up and running.

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

 

[web4fun]

Thanks for the feedback mrdenny. I had thought about the DNS aliasing before but the manual intervention in regards to failover was the part that nixed that idea. Much appreciated sir.