Re: Building high available and high performance web sites with MS

What is the purpose of adding extra nodes past the 2 node cluster if
clustering is just for failover? I read about adding extra nodes when

One reason is cost. If you can live with the assumption that only one node
may fail at a time, you can have three 'active' nodes sharing a common
'passive' node, i.e. 3+1, and save two servers compared to three sets of
two-node clusters. In case two or more nodes fail at the same time,
performance would suffer on a 3+1 cluster. As long as this is made clear to
the business, it is a small(er) probability sceanrio, and it is clearly
spelled out in the SLA, a 3+1 cluster may be attractive to the business, or
whoever writes the check.

Linchi

"Flaxen" wrote:

What is the purpose of adding extra nodes past the 2 node cluster if
clustering is just for failover? I read about adding extra nodes when
researching and didnt see why that would be advantageous? In case multiple
servers malfunction at the same time?

Ok, now that I know Clustering wont solve my problem, is there another
method of doing database load balancing? Would have lets say 3 servers, each
acting as a publisher/subscriber and then a 2-node cluster acting as a
distributer work well in this situation? I feel in this solution, i would
have 3 sql servers with the same info and then a high available distributer.

Then I assume I would need a way to make the 3 sql servers appear as one
server somehow so the code only has to reference one sql server. Maybe round
robin dns?

Am i making this too difficult? Is there an easier solution? I cant
imagine I am the only one who needs a solution where you can scale Microsoft
SQL servers effectively.

Thanks in advance.
"Geoff N. Hiten" wrote:

You are asking about two goals. First let me addres the availability issue.
Microsoft clustering is a failover technology where a SQL instance can move
between host computers in case of hardware or systems failure. The basic
single-instance, two-node cluster (sometimes incorrectly called
Active/Passive) uses only one host at a time. You can add additional nodes
(host computers) and instances, but the instances do not share information
and are not "brick-type" scalable.

Right now, the way to scale SQL is to replace the host computer with a
larger one. With failover clustering, you can do this with minimal downtime
by replacing one node at a time.

--
Geoff N. Hiten
Senior Database Administrator
Microsoft SQL Server MVP




"Flaxen" <Flaxen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7A300D7D-7E43-49DF-A3A7-9A134C55AA22@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all. My first time posting to this newsgroup, but I think I am in the
right place. I am in the discovery stage of building a web site that we
anticipate will have a large amount of traffic. Our design platform is
Windows and Microsoft SQL and the goal is to have web sites and database
servers that are not only high available but also scalable that I can put
in
a new server as needed to increase performance.

For the web sites, I know that I can use the NLB services of Windows 2003
standard edition. My lack of knowledge, though, is on the MS SQL side. I
have been reading a lot of info on Microsoft SQL server failover, but from
what I have read this tyipcally entails having two MS SQL servers running
in
an active/passive mode.

Does Microsoft SQL Server support the ability to have multiple MS SQL
servers using the same database and appearing as one physically database?
If
one fails, the other servers pick up the load, and if we need to add a new
server we simply install it into the cluster?

I understand that I will need enterprise edition to accomplish the goals
above, but are these goals even doable?

I know I can setup a bunch of SQL servers all doing transaction
replication, but that makes each server appear as its own database server
and
I feel is not the proper solution for this.

Hope my questions make sense and looking forward to the answers.



.

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