Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
- From: Gerrard Shaw <GerrardShaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:45:02 -0700
Thanks again for your reply - I had a feeling it wasn't going to be good news
though...
I would be concerned about Exchange on a NAS for performance reasons
and reliability. As far as failover of the NAS, I suspect that would
be fine for your file servers, but I would be surprised if Exchange did
not need some help to reconnect to the data once the failover was
complete.
I would suggest you investigate addiding some additional direct
attached storage to you Exchange servers and going with a third party
replication solution for Exchange failover.
With only £4k left in our IT replacement budget for the year the only
attached storage I see the servers getting in the near future is a USB pen
drive :p
Have to say I'm worried by the performance of 1 NAS box doing about 4 or 5
different data tasks at the same time - I'm thinking IIS might have the same
problem as Exchange if the file storage suddenly disappeared and re-appeared
during NAS failover...
Even if you choose to go with the solution you outlined, you still have
not provided HA for any of you applications as MSCS will most certainly
not work with your NAS. The only protection you have is for your data
which is being replicated by DoubleTake. Even this is not complete
protection because if you get data corruption, this corruption will
also be replicated to the secondary NAS.
DHCP, DNS, Print Server etc won't be clustered as it's not possible to do
with our current setup by the looks of things. I now knowthat although
majority node set sorts the quorum problems but for MSCS print clustering you
need a shared disk again anyway so all that goes out the window anyway! It's
really Exchange we want to sort out now as there's ways and methods to get
around the other bits...
It's not a total HA solution by any means but at the end of the day we're a
small-medium education organisation and perhaps the ideas got a bit carried
away without seeing what's really involved - already we've had a rethink and
scaled down the plans to more sensible and do-able levels...
If you must go with the hardware you have available, I suggest you
scrap DoubleTake and dedicate the secondary NAS to be used exclusively
by your Exchange server to get a performance gain.
Bet that idea would go down like a lead balloon after what we spent on it
but again it's a sensible solution to a problem of our own making (well not
of my making as I would have researched a bit more before buying in the first
place!)
This does not provide you any HA, but your proposed solution really does not seem to
buy you any HA and may in fact decrease your uptime due to the
complexity of the setup.
Yup I haven't seen a setup like it anywhere on any of the clustering
examples - that either makes it "unique" (postive view) or insnane(everyone
else's view!!!)
Still all of this has taught me loads and now I can write "experience with
clustering technologies" on my application form for promotion this week ;)
Regards,
Gerrard
.
- References:
- Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
- From: John Fullbright [MVP]
- Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
- From: Russ Kaufmann [MVP]
- Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
- From: daveberm
- Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
- From: daveberm
- Re: New Servers with Clustering - a bit confused!
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