SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

Recommend configurations

I currently have a new project that calls for two servers. SQL Server will be installed on at least one server for the production environemnt and one server may be used as a reporting server. I would like to know the best configuration available to allow the best performance. Should I use clustering, replication, load balancing, etc???

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/search.mspx. about Hardware Compatibility List and this Technet linkhttp://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sql/sql0812.mspx about CLustering chat which may be useful for you to understand about cluster. And also this linkhttp://www.sql-server-performance.com/clustering_resources.asp about clustering resources.
Satya SKJ
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You may want to consider and active/active cluster, with SQL Server running on one node, and Reporting Services on the other. If you do, be sure to get enough RAM in each server to be able to handle the total load should a failover occur. Clustering offers fault tolerance, but no boost in performance. Load balancing does not apply to SQL Server. Replication should only be used in limited cases where replication is needed, but not to boost performance or for fault tolerance. —————————–
Brad M. McGehee, MVP
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As others have noted clustering offers no advantage in performance but it does offer failover in case your SQL server goes down the other server in the cluster will basically take over in its place. Load Balancing pertains to sharing load on web server or middleware in Microsoft world as SQL server itself does no load balancing between multiple servers. Also replication is mainly used to merge data from multiple databases or to replicate one server to another and can help performance by allowing multiple SQL Server machines to replace the role of a single database server but it can be used only in limited situations from your post it doesn’t seem to apply to your situation.

If the secondary server is for reporting purposes only then you can take advantage of Log shipping or create your own log shipping process. Satya SKJ
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In comment to the clustering statement: Doesnt an active/active cluster offers more hardware processing power compared to 1 server? Use the dark side of Technology..

No, as rage1973 mention active/active has no performance advantage. It’s just two nodes running their one seperate SQL instances with the option to fail over to the other node incase of failure.

You could also do active/passive with another reporting instance on the passive side. I’m not too fond of the idea of failing over reporting to my production server. That’s just me though. <img src=’/community/emoticons/emotion-1.gif’ alt=’

‘ /><br /><br />Derrick Leggett<br /><br />

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