December 26, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Hello Experts
(1) Could you pls explain the major differences of 'active-active' and 'active-passive' cluster in Windows Cluster server 2003? Which is mostly used and why whiling chosing the right clustering model?
(2) Difference between the 'Load Balancing cluster' and 'Failover cluster'?
Thanks.
December 27, 2009 at 3:14 am
This information is in Books Online and is explained there probably much better than there than could be explained on a forum post especially since none of these subjects are small. My recommendation is to become an "expert" yourself... look them up in Books Online and consume the knowledge there.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
December 27, 2009 at 4:06 am
Jeff's advise is indeed the best starting place.
Clustering (a/a - A/p) can be used to host clustered sqlinstances.
Load balancing isn't in scope for sqlserver yet ( I didn't check this with SQL2008 R2) but off course, you can have applications on a load balanced environment that use sqlserver.
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December 27, 2009 at 6:07 am
Active-active is two SQL instances, one running on each node, each one using the other one's node as it's passive failover. Hence you can look at it as two active-passive clusters combined into one.
SQL clusters are failover. SQL cannot do load balancing.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
December 27, 2009 at 7:23 am
I was chatting about clustering with Robert Davies and a few other Microsoft guys over on linkedIN (Also Alan Hirt agrees in his book), who are not happy with the use of the terms Active/Passive and Active/Active clustering...
I will quote Allan Hirt in his 2007 book titled Pro SQL Server 2005 High Availability who I think explains this best when he says
“…two terms have become linked to SQL Server clustering: Active/Passive and Active/Active. Those terms are at best loosely accurate…”
Alan goes on to say that he has been arguing for a long time against the use of these terms.
Gail is right when she said an Active/Active cluster is a two node two instance cluster, with each instance running on each of the two nodes and one node running both instances in the event of a failover situation. You can also have more than two nodes and more than two instances of SQL Server running in a Cluster. . A three node, three instance cluster is not known as Active/Active/Active cluster and technically it is not an Active/Active configuration either...hence the Microsoft guys arguing that 'Multi-Instance clustering ' is 'more correct' terminology.
Active/Passive is used to describe a cluster where you have one instance of SQL Server running on a two node cluster. One node is active running the instance of SQL Server while the other waits in a passive state for the other node to failover, in the event of a failover the second node takes over the running of the SQL instance. Again you could have three nodes and two instances running in a cluster. With one node acting as the passive 'failover' node. Active/Passive is just a configuration of an N+1 cluster where N is the number of instances running and N+1 is the number of nodes in the cluster, under normal circumstances there will be a node in the cluster acting as a passive node waiting for a failover to occur.
Jeff is also right, BOL will provide much more detail than could be offered in a forum post so you would be wise to take his advice and read up on the subject there too. Also Alan’s book is an excellent resource on the subject.
Gethyn Elliswww.gethynellis.com
February 11, 2011 at 11:58 pm
I have a scenario here, what if we want to implement 3 active & 1 passive clustering, our active servers will be running more than one instances just becoz of security & better administration (like if we need to restart one instance it should not affect others). for simplicity, consider that we have 42 DBs all equally
divided on 3 active server. we will be using SAN. now my queries are:
1) is there any thing wrong in my understanding? like this is not possible or not possible this way
2) how many instances & DBs our passive server have? as any if the active server fails it should handling the request
3) will the recommended solution be different of we go for SQL server 2008 r2?
thanks
February 12, 2011 at 1:20 am
Please post new questions in a new thread. Thank you.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
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