SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive
Multi-node clustering and Windows 2003
Hello to everyone,I am currently looking into setting up multi-node cluster using Windows 2003 Advanced (to avoid 2 node limitations W2K has)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/clustering.mspx My question is – have anyone set up or have run 3+ node cluster using Windows 2003 and if yes, how did you go about storage (setting up , connecting, considerations,etc) Thank you in advance Simas
In theory it’s not much different than 2 nodes. You perform the "add node to cluster" part on each extra node as well. When you have 3 or more nodes up and running with windows clustering then you install a virtual sql instance as normal. The install will set it up on all involved nodes.
Argyle: thanks for you advice for I have same question as well. Based on your way, if I set up a 4-node cluster, how many of them is active? coz normally the reason to install multi node cluster is to use more nodes to process transaction than active/passive mode. (e.g. in active/passive two nodes cluster, we should have one node stand by but I’d like 3 or 4 nodes active and only one node stand by in the scenerio of 4 or 5 nodes cluster Appriciate any help from those know about it. thanks heaps.
Windows clustering is a failover cluster not a load balance cluster. So the nodes to not share load or transactions. There is no performance gain using multiple nodes for an application that use a single database. If you use multiple applications with multiple databases then you can manually divide the load by putting different databases on different sql instances and then let the instances run on separate nodes. The term active here just mean that one node has one or more sql instances running on it. It is totally up to you how many sql instances you want to install in the cluster and on which nodes you put them on. In theory you could install 16 instances but have them all running on one node. Then only this node would be "active". You could also put 5 instances on one node, 5 on one node, 6 on another and none on the last one. These are all independent sql instances with their own disks on the shared storage. You would require licensing for all active nodes in the cluster. If you run sql instances on 3 of the 4 nodes you would have to pay for 12 cpus if the servers had 4 cpus each and you where using processor licensing.
]]>