SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

CLustering Cold-Feet – advise.

We had a plan that everyone on our team and IT bought in to and agreed upon. We would take our critical service databases and migrate them to a multi-instance cluster for consolidation and high-availability, Active-Active (we’re also adding a dr component) Now, that we’re actually readying to get approval and move on the plan, my mgr wants to understand what to do in case 1)we have recycle service, or 2)reboot, if a service or database is hung, as now we have other critical apps sharing the same cluster. Will it be more unlikely to have to reboot the db server once we’re on SQL2005 64-bit cluster?? We recently had an app hang the database, and the service hung so we had to reboot – therefore, he is pondering the ‘what if’ scenario, if it had been on a cluster w/other apps. It is a legitimate concern, and nothing is 100% guaranteed. So, what can say? What are the pros over the cons? Many thanks!

what is the reliability record of each db/app?
ie, do not consolidate an app with a poor reliability record with apps of known good behavior.
find out why the above crash occured before you consolidate what version of OS and SQL Server is each on now?
if not W2K3 64-bit & SQL 2005 64-bit
first get each on 64-bit on separate systems to find out if there are problems individually
before you consolidate 64-bit should be more resilient to VAS problems than 32-bit
but if you app or driver has a memory leak, eventually even the 64-bit system will crash

Also, depending on the number of databases and the size of the stored proceudres you could run a 32-bit install out of MemToLeave space. As Joe recommends, move to 64-bit but do so with plenty of testing for one) moving to 2005 and two) moving to 64-bit multi-db multi-server.

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