SQL Server 2008 redundancies, OS level or Hypervisor level ?

[AlbertWT]

Hi All,

At the moment I'd like to combine my departmental SQL Server into one big SQL Server 2008 instances spread across two servers (for redundancy reason).

How/what is the best way to approach this ?

is it through clustering or Log shipping or VMware (hypervisor) High Availability features ?

Note: this DB server cannot go down as it is hosting the VCenter DB and also server monitoring database too.

Any suggestion and comment would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[AlbertWT]

At the moment the SQL Server is spread across several smaller servers 3-4 SQL Server 2000 and 2005 with the total of 70 DB inside those servers, what I'd like to do/build is to migrate them all into SQL Server 2008 in which I must make it redundant so that if one server failed for whatever reason, the other instance can just pick it up straight away.

so from several smaller SQL Servers, I want to consolidate them all into one more powerful SQL Server 2008 x64.

but so far don't know which technology that is suitable for that or if it is possible to do in SQL Serve 2008 Standard.

[eeg3]

HA by itself will provide a modest level of redundancy compared to other options, but you'll still have the downtime when the VM is restarting on another host; HA doesn't depend on vCenter (and subsequently its DB). Also, if you can get by with one vCPU performance-wise, using Fault Tolerance seems like a possible approach.

[AlbertWT]

Yes, that is why I didn't put FT into the list of possbile solution, so I was just wondering if I can just set the big SQL Server 2008x64 Std. VM as single instance and then make it HA enabled to cater my above requirement ?

cmiiw.

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

VMware HA does not protect the single service and it could need some minutes to restart your VM.

If this delay it's ok, then go with this.

Otherwise you must use Microsoft Fail-over Cluster.

Andre

[AlbertWT]

Ah, so in this case HA mirroring is enough for me as long as the server not losing any data significantly.

the reason why I am asking is to know what are my options.

CHeers,

AWT

[AlbertWT]

ok, here's that I'd like to implement:

ESX1:
VM1: Windows Server 2008 Standard + SQL Server 2008 Standard (RDM into the SAN) - clustering mirror

ESX2:
VM2: Windows Server 2008 Standard + SQL Server 2008 Standard (RDM into the same SAN LUN as above) - clustering mirror

any comments are welcome.

[JPK871]

Here's a really good discussion I've run across with the same basic questions:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2011/04/18/design-question-from-a-reader/