Difference with Cluster on Standard & Enterprise

  • Hi all,

    What is the difference between clustering on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Editions or clustering on SQL Server 2008 Standard Editions?

    I know with Standard Edition I can only create 2 nodes, but are there any other differences?

    Thanks,

    Koen

  • From a clustering perspective there are no other differences between the versions, no. There are significant differences in manageability and performance that you should take into account though.



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  • I was also not aware of any difference, but a consultant from an external company told me the hot stand by of the 2nd node would only work on Entrprise Edition.

    About the performance & managebility difference, today we use standard, and it is sufficient, online rebuilt of index would be handy sometimes, but in general in my opinion the costs do not outweight the benefits.

  • Enterprise Edition is more than online reindexing. For example you have data compression and advanced read-ahead which can provide storage savings and performance improvements.

    You should also have a word with your consultant, they are providing you completely wrong information. You can have up to 25 instances installed, however Standard edition limits you to a failover pair of nodes (versus up to 16 with Enterprise Edition) and it's not a "hot standby" situation.



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  • Nicholas Cain (6/6/2012)


    Standard edition limits you to a failover pair of nodes (versus up to 16 with Enterprise Edition) and it's not a "hot standby" situation.

    Note, this does not affect the amount of nodes that may join the Windows cluster,

    not sure what you mean by not a hot standby?

    This link details differences between std and ent editions

    Apart from the obvious such as TDE, mirroring, fast recovery, page restores, db snapshots and online indexing most of the Ent features are BI related

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • I don't know what the concept of a "hot standby" is and as relates to this the idea doesn't make a lot of sense.



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  • Thanks for the input!

    STD vs ENT edition will always be a discussion here, the ENT edition is much more expensive... again I don't think the costs will outweight the benifit. STD edition supports everything we need, I can beter invest the cash in a SSD ioDrive to put the tempdb on.

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