March 31, 2010 at 12:33 pm
I did a search in the forums and all that came up where topics on active-active-passive or active-active-active-passive setups.
We're consolidation servers and we need 3 big servers. A lot of these servers being consolidated are in desperate need of having hardware upgrades but can't have anymore ram added or more/newer cpus installed, they're older machines and a few of the SQL Servers are installed in VMs not even properly configured to run anything more than a few excel spreadsheets and maybe even a couple of MS Access databases.
Anyway, the envisioned setup is to cluster 3 nodes in an active-active-active mode as follows:
server 1 fails over to server 2
server 2 fails over to server 3
server 3 fails over to server 1
All servers running w2k8r2x64 with 2 quad cores (upgradable to 4), 64GB RAM (upgradable to 128) and SQL2k5sp3 Enterprise.
I know the recommendation will be to go with 4 nodes, 3 active and 1 passive with all 3 actives setup to fail over to the passive node. BUT due to money issues (the company was not even prepared to by 3 nodes, never mind 4) it would be preferable to do the 3 node all active and next year add the fourth node and then reconfigure at that time.
Has anyone done this? Is it even possible? I've only worked on 2 node clusters before, so I don't know if the 3 node setup described scenario can even be setup at all.
Thanks in advance.
March 31, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Yes, it can be done, just realize that it is entirely possible that TWO nodes could fail meaning that all your databases may have to run on one server if that occurs. Be sure to plan for that contingency when planning out your hardware requirements.
March 31, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Yes, the possibilities of 2 servers failing over has already been explained. But it's up to the higher ups to decide risk vs cost.
Thanks for the quick response.
Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply