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