Gurus,

 We have geographically dispersed 5 node MNS cluster (Windows 2003 / Sql Server 2000).  Primary site has 2 nodes and secondary site has 3 nodes. We had an extrnal audit and they raised an issue that if the seconday site goes down our cluster will go down coz majority count will be lost. Managagement is looking for possible suggestions to improve this.

Can you pls help with possible suggestions to overcome this senario.

Can we use any other clustering solution by other providers to overcome this.

Thanks

An update is available that adds a file share witness feature and a configurable cluster heartbeats feature to Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1-based server clusters

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921181

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737067.aspx 

Is there a way I can allow for a “minority set” to take control of the cluster?

Yes, there is a way for a “minority” set to be allowed to start up and initialize the cluster. But this is a manual process and has to be done in a specified manner. Details on the same are available in “help”.

 Thanks Mohammed.