• tobyteel (7/15/2011)


    I think my earlier question may not have been clear, so I'll try to rephrase: In what situations would you want to use SQL server with the Microsoft cluster service? I understand why you might want to set up a test environment with VMs. I would like to know why you might want to use this architecture over other SQL server scale-out architectures (there seem to be a LOT of options).

    I really don't mean to beat this to death, but I really would like to know.

    I'm not sure entirely why this is relevant, books online details the difference between the various HA options but we aim to please so

    Log Shipping


    commonly used to replicate a single database to a remote server for offloading of reporting applications, can also be used as a secondary failover database (manual interaction)

    Replication


    commonly used to replicate chosen parts of a database schema\data to a remote server for a variety of application (reporting, data distribution)

    Database Mirroring


    create a failover instance of a chosen database. Can also be used for reporting via the use of database snapshots. This is clustering merely at the database level

    Failover Clustering


    Primary purpose is to guard against on site hardware failures. In the event of a server loss the whole instance may be quickly resumed on another host

    For further info please check Books Online. This article aims to give users the ability to create their own SQL Server cluster from scratch and in the process gain a little knowledge of the surrounding technologies (AD, DNS, ip addressing, Windows server, etc).

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