Server Failover Clustering - Costs And More Details
Mar 24, 2008
Hi All,
We're planning to install a Server 2005 Failover Cluster and I'd like to find more information about licensing, etc.
Basic questions:
- What is the best O.S. to run? Win 2003 or the new 2008? And what version (datacenter, enterprise)?
- Since I'm going to use 2 machines, will I have to pay for 2 licenses (sql and windows - two lic. each)? Or just 1 license, since just 1 machine will be the active server?
This is for some web applications, so, web environment.
I have 2 Windows 2003 r2 servers with a SQL failover cluster installed across the 2 node. Generally I have been running off node1 with node2 as the failover partner. I have purchased the correct licensing for noe1 and from the following I do not need to purchase a license for node2:
Failover clustering is a process where the operating system and SQL Server 2005 work together to provide availability in the event of an application failure, hardware failure, or operating-system error. Failover clustering provides hardware redundancy through a configuration in which critical resources are transferred automatically from a failing machine to an equally configured server to help ensure continuity of service.
When doing failover support, a server is designated as the passive server. The purpose of the passive server is to absorb the data and information held in another server that fails. A passive server does not need a license if the number of processors in the passive server is equal to or less than the number of processors in the active server. The passive server can take the duties of the active server for 30 days. Afterwards, it must be licensed accordingly
1) If I switch my cluster instace to point to node2 for testing node2 in case of a failover, would I need to purchase another licence ? This means I am not doing the repointing because of an 'event of an application failure, hardware failure, or operating-system error' ? Can you please provide information from MS ?
2) How are SQL Licences bound to the windows install in a SQL Server failover cluster configuration ? For instance if node1 legitimately fails due to an 'event of an application failure, hardware failure, or operating-system error' and you failover to node2. Then you think, stuff (forget about) node1 as I have 1 set of licences for SQL Enterprise already and therefore can run with a legitimate licence on node2. Can you please clarify ?
3) I have heard that only one server needs a license in a failover cluster. Then how does this fit in with any of the questions from above:
'The passive server can take the duties of the active server for 30 days. Afterwards, it must be licensed accordingly' ?
In the event of a legitimate failure, node2 would be running off the license purchased. So why are MS restricting the use of it for 30 days ?
We want to use sql 2005 failover clustering feature, so that upgrade sql 2000 is necessary. But some of the stored procedures built in 2000 are not working directly in 2005, set the compatibility level to 80 could make them work. In this case, can somebody here tell me if down grade the database level will affect failover clustering running properly? e.g. will data still be synchronized properly? Thanks in advance.
I have a 2 node Microsoft 2000 cluster with a shared storage device. Iwant to create automatic failover for MS SQL 2000 server. I can dothat wit the following options:1. Active/Pasive (one instance installed)2. Active/Active (More then one instance/virtual sql serversinstalled)I have a question about option 2.Is it possible to have more then one instance/virtual SQL server,service only one database for example loadbalancing. ?, or when youcreate multiple instances/virtual SQL servers, does that mean you havemultiple databases ? If not why does a Virtual SQL server has to betaken over by a cluster node that didnt fail. Then you can actuallyuse option 1. Please advise!The documentation is not very clear on this issues.Regards,Nico de Groot
Dear Friends,I wanted to configure Failover cluster for SQL Server 2000 on Windows2000 advanced servers.I have only 2 no.s of windows 2000 advanced server m/cs. I dont haveany shared disks and SCSI drives. Can I still configure the Failoverclustering?I would like to know more about the need for the shared disks in theFailover clustering.Please shed some light.RegardsKumar
Does anyone know how to obtain the physical server name that a SQL failover cluster instance is running on through the system tables or other database commands? Thanks in advance.
I have two SQL 7.0 SP1 (WinNT 4.0 SP 6.2) Servers using Clustering.
Problem: When SQLBox1 goes down, the Failover sends it to SQLBox2. When SQLBox1 comes back up, the node stays on SQLBox2, instead of going back to SQLBox1. This happens over 50% of the time, but not every time. Sometimes it works fine.
I have done 3 hours of research, and can not find anything on this problem, can any one a tleast point me in the right direction. I can hardly find any troubleshooting on this issue. I do have January 2000 of the MSDN Library installed on my machine if that helps, but there was not much on it in there either (at least not that I found).
In evaluating/comparing MS Clustering vs Hardware Failover Blades, has anyone come across any disadvantages/concerns for a Hardware Failover Blades.
Why would you install MS SQL 2000 Clustering when you can use a Hardware Failover Blade and use a SQL 2000 standard edition. e.g In an event a hardware failure occurs the admin manager brings over a standby hardware blade and reassigns it to the SAN (on which OS and SQL 2000) is installed and you are up and running.
Would appreciate any comments and suggestions to compare these solutions.
how to configure email in SQL server failover clustering. I need to configure email to send when node switches from one node to another. best way to configure email in fail over clustering?
I tested the failover clustering for SQL 2008R2.When I stop the SQL server services manully, the failover did not fail to another resource. At the Faiolover cluster manager, SQl server(MSSQLSERVER) only show the status for offline. I think it should be move to another owner intead of just show as offline.
I am looking in to using Microsoft Clustering supported in NT Server Enterprise to provide failover support for 2 database servers running SQL Server 7. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with it--good or bad. I read the white paper and it sounds good, but I'd like to get some real world application experience.
I am confuse and cant decide on how to setup high availability on our SQL 2005. Here's what on my mind and on resources list:
I plan to have mirroring on my SQL1 to SQL2 with the help of SQL3 as witness. So this would be automatic failover. My idea on mirroring is when SQL1 goes down, SQL3 would tell SQL2 to run and be the primary. It will automatically failover to SQL2. Right? My questions are:
1) How can I revert back to SQL1 once it is ready?
2) I read in one of the post that it is impossible to write in a mirrored DB, is this true? I mean, what's the use of failing over to the next node when it's not possible to write and update data/records?
3) If number 2 is false (i hope so), how would the data be synchronize from SQL2 back to SQL1. Those transaction that were made while SQL1 is down.
4) How about the connection string from the web applications? Would it be automatically point to SQL2? We have load balancing setup in place, would this help web application connection to automatically point to SQL2?
Another setup:
We have SAN in place (not yet used, but is planning to use for this SQL thing), EMC to be specific. My question would be:
1) For SAN setup, the data storage would be centralize. So would that mean that SQL1 and SQL2 services will use the same data and log file from the SAN storage?
2) How would you call this setup then? Can this be clustering type of high availability? Will clustering work under load balancing setup? I believe mirroring is not possible here? Right?
3) How can I setup my 3 SQL servers with the same theory in mind: when SQL1 goes down, SQL2 will take over. Data will be synchronize when SQL1 is up and running again. With automatic failover and reverting back to primary.
I read so much topics about this, but the more I research, the more I get confuse.
Any suggestions, comments, advice is greatly appreciated!
I've got an app that's poorly designed and doesn't do connection pooling. It causes the login rate/sec on our prod server to jump up to 15/sec. I'm trying to qualify the resource cost of this behaviour. Althought this application logs in and out, it only ever has one active spid. It never holds anything in the db, it's purely an auth cost. I'm currently trying to correlate this with SQL Server cpu time, and memory.
Does anyone know where I can find some documentation, or some tips as far as login rate is concerned?
I've been struggling with this for some time. we have to group data based on Patients admission date and discharge date. If any Patients discharge date + 1 = admission date then we have group both rows into one row and sum costs from both the rows. Please check out the sample input and expected output for details.
1. Once fail over to secondary replica, what will happen to connected session in primary node? can the session fail over to secondary seamlessly or need to re-login. what happen committed transactions which has not write to disk. 2. Assume I have always on cluster with three nodes, if primary fails, how second node make write/ read mode. 3. after fail over done to 2nd secondary node what mode in production(readonly or read write). 4. how to rollback to production primary ,will change data in secondary will get updated in primary.
Hi All,I'm a relative newbie to SQL Server, so please forgive me if this is adaft question...When I set "Show Execution Plan" on in Query Analyzer, and execute a(fairly complex) sproc, I note that a particular query is reported ashaving a query cost of "71% relative to the batch" - however, this isnowhere near the slowest executing query in the batch - other querieswhich take over twice as long are reported as having costs in theorder of a few percent each.Am I misreading the execution plan? Note that I'm looking at thegraphical plan, and am not reading the 'estimated' plan - I'm usingthe one generated from executing the sproc. My expectation was thatthis would be based on the execution times of the queries within thesproc, however, this does not appear to be the case. (Note - Idetermined execution times from PRINT statements, using GETDATE() todetermine the current time, down to milliseconds).Any feedback would be of great assistance... I may well have tochange the way I approach optimizing queries based on these findings.Thanks,LemonSmasher.
I have a temporary table (@tblResults) that has 4 columns that need to be populated with a calculation made from columns held within 2 other tables.
Joins @tblResults tr JOIN dbo.MarketPrice mp ON tr.Item = mp.Item AND tr.[Month] = mp.[Month] AND tr.[Year] = mp.[Year] AND mp.[Date] BETWEEN tr.LatestStartDate AND tr.PriorEndDate
[code]....
Where the 2 dbo.MarketPrice and dbo.MillDifferentials date fields are NOT equal, the last (chronologically) dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value should be used (or '0' if no previous value found).
so expected results where @tblResults.Id = 1:
The dbo.MarketPrice.Price value of '2014-10-29' should be combined with the dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value of '2014-10-06' - this produces the combined Max value of 184.50 The dbo.MarketPrice.Price value of '2014-04-28' should be combined with the dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value of '2014-04-28' The dbo.MarketPrice.Price value of '2014-01-22' should be combined with the dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value of '2014-01-20' The dbo.MarketPrice.Price value of '2014-01-21' should be combined with the dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value of '2014-01-20' - this produces the combined Min value of 111.50 The dbo.MarketPrice.Price value of '2014-01-04' should be combined with '0.00' if there is no matching or previous dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value OR the top 1/max (most recent) dbo.MillDifferentials.Diff value if a record is found before the specified @tblResults.LatestStartDate
We have set up Mirroring with a witness server and everything works fine when we failover from the SQL Management console.
However, if we failover when our Maccola client is connected, the client blows up - clearly because it can no longer connect to the database.
The ODBC DSN used by the Maccola client shows a checkbox for the 'select a failover server' but the checkbox is grayed out.
Also the summary of settings for the DSN at the end of the wizard reveals that the failover to server (y/N) option is set to N.
The default setting for this DSN is 'populate the remaining values by querying the server' but it doesn't appear to be getting the settings for failover from the server or any other interactive DSN settings either. The server is clearly set for mirroring.
Another suspicious item is that the DSN cannot connect to the server with SA permissions, even though the server is set to mixed security and we use the correct authentication.
Is it possible that the client MACHINE is not authenticating with the domain or sql server properly. We are logged into the client with the domain account that is the SQL admin account on the sql server box.
We should be able to interact with the sql server settings through the ODBC DSN on the client shoulnd't we?
1. In alwaysON fail over cluster, Once fail over to secondary replica, what will happen to connected session in primary node? can the session fail over to secondary seamlessly or need to re-login. what happen committed transactions which has not write to disk.
2. Assume I have always on cluster with three nodes, if primary fails, how second node make write/ read mode.
3. After fail over done to 2nd secondary node what mode in production(readonly or read write).
4. How to rollback to production primary ,will change data in secondary will get updated in primary.
We have 2 env. : Testing and Production, both are running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server with SQL Server 2005. The difference is Testing is NOT running Windows cluster but Production do so, what is the best way to transfer a database from testing to production?
We have another systems that both testing and production are running on NON-cluster and we use backup/restore to transfer the database, can it apply in this case.
And I found that there are a tools called DTC, which can transfer all DB objects from one DB to another, is it a best way to transfer between non-cluster and cluster env.?
I open up the SQL Server Agent Job window, and I can't see details under the General, Steps, Schedules, or other tabs unless I am running SSMS directly on that server. So much for remote management, eh? Anybody else experiencing this problem? Anybody else notice that jobs may fail to complete correctly without raising any errors or logging any issues? Anybody else remember when, a year ago, SQL Server was a good product? Anybody think Microsoft is listening? Anybody? Buehler? Buehler?
Hi everybody,I'm installing a network monitoring tool (OpManager). Duringinstallation I reached the following step: Configure the SQL Serverdetails.Host Name: ???Port: 1433Database Name: xxxUser Name: ???Password: ???I don't know which host name I need to put in and also I don't knowwhich user name and password is required.Please can anyone help me with this.Thank you!
Those of you who are using MS Clustering, what are some advantages vs. a third party product such as "Double-Take" ? If you have used "Doube-Take" I would be extremely interested in your thought of the product.
Is it relatively easy to setup and configure with and environment that's using all the standard products of BACKOFFICE (SQL Server 7.0 Standard Edition, NT 4.0 Standard Edition etc...)
Any hints, tips, etc... would be also GREATLY appreciated.
I have a question about database clustering. I am loking for the solution for the databse scalability, performance and zero downtime especially for MS SQL Server. As my understanding (correct if I am wrong), only Oracle provides 2 DB Servers (parallel server) or NT clustering for two sql servers. The drawback for these solution is only one server is working and another one is standing by. It is not efficent (which only 50%). Is any way that I could built the DB server farm which every DB server is working, if one failed, throw it away, rest of them still working; if I need more power, just add another db server box.How to solve the data sync problem ? Replication is not good for more than 4 or 5 db servers in the farm. Disk mirror is not good since if the server is down, there is no way to access the disks. DO you have any good idea ?
In a clustered sql server environment having two Nodes, configured as Active/Active or Active/Passive, do I need to create the databases on both the Nodes? I am not too sure about how to create databases in the clustered environment. Can somebody help..
Will removing the built in administrator account from the sql server cluster have any related problem with failover happening. Is it ok if i add the domain account under which sql server runs and add it to the local administrators box of both the nodes. I was thinking of not allowing the built in administrator account to access the sql server. Thought adding only the account under which the sql server service runs is enough which is also a domain account with local administrator privileges on both the nodes of the cluster.
I have one situation. I need to find out the processes which are all in deadlock state. I my figure out that SQL server maintains the process details in sysprocesses table.
Can any one please help me, Whether this is the table which contains deadlock details. If not where are they stored and How to kill that process ?
An application that i wrote (that interacts with SQL Server 2000) is causing deadlocks on the server. i have no direct access to the server, but the user have sent me a server trace.
Having very little experience with SQL Server 2000, all that i learn from the trace is that, well, there is a deadlock, but i had already known that beforehand.
What other useful details can be interpreted from the trace above? How can i obtain information like the specific statement(s) which cause the deadlock, etc?
