Advantages of Active/Active over Active/Passive | SQL Server Performance Forums

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Advantages of Active/Active over Active/Passive

I would like to know what advantages are there in using a SQL Server 2k in an A/A configuration over that of an A/P one. I am not sure what benefits it has nor how much more efficient it is as an SQL server in an A/A or A/P mode. Could someone kindly en-lighten me with regard to this aspect. Thank you.
Hi there,<br /><br />The benefit of active/active is that you are able to use both servers for some databases, thus spreading the load across two physical machines<br /><br />The main disadvantages are:<br />- higher cost of licensing, need twice the SQL Server Enterprise edition licenses<br />- easy to overcommit the cluster so that when failover occurs, the remaining node can’t handle the load<br /><br />The second one is the most common mistake with an active/active cluster. You HAVE to make sure that the sum of resources used on both nodes is still less than the hardware spec of each node… e.g. if 2GB RAM is in use on one and 1GB is used on the other then you need at least 3GB RAM in each server.<br /><br />NOTE that I’m not saying that the hardware requirement is that much greater for and active/active cluster, just that you can get a false sense of security until a node actually fails<br /><br />I prefer active/active, but only because something inside me doesn’t like having a server doing nothing at all… much be the Dutch in me <img src=’/community/emoticons/emotion-5.gif’ alt=’;-)’ /><br /><br />Cheers<br />Twan
If you search the forum, and the website, you will see a lot of discussion on this issue already. —————————–
Brad M. McGehee, MVP
Webmaster
SQL-Server-Performance.Com
Brief encounter of what BRad referredhttp://www.sql-server-performance.com/clustering_resources.asp
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Satya SKJ
Moderator
SQL-Server-Performance.Com

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