Cluster Capacity

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From: ebferro (ebferro_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 12/09/04 

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 13:05:05 -0800

This is a question for all of the cluster experts out there. We recently
acquired 3 Dell Poweredge 2650's with Dual 3.06 gig 1MB Xeon processors and 2
gigs of ram. Two of these machines, I have clustered together and installed
a SQL Server database on the cluster. We did this primarily for higher
availability, not because our old database server (a 2.4 gig Dual Xeon with 2
gigs of ram machine) was being challenged. We also have an old 500Mhz Dual
Xeon that we're using as a file server. Again, I don't see any bottlenecks
on this machine, either. My question to the experts is this. Given that
neither of the old machines is being taxed, do you think that if we put both
file serving and database on the cluster we'd notice a degradation in
performance? Does anyone know how we might check this prior to doing it?
In addition to that question, I've got another. If I were to take the third
machine and add it to my cluster so I now have three machines instead of two,
would the workload be spread over two machines (N+1) rather than all of the
burden being placed on one machine in a two node cluster? I guess this
question boils down to if I add a third node, do I get an
active/active/passive cluster rather than an active/passive cluster using
only two nodes.
Thanks in advance for any advice that can be offered.

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