MSCS Clusters, iSCSI, Distance Clusters and SQL 2005

Michael Steineke — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 05:30:00 GMT

This has been a fun week with clustering. Myself and a few others have been working this week on setting up a couple lab environments.

Lab 1:
2 - Hyper-V Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise 64Bit VM's
iSCSI LUNS
MSCS Shared Quorum Cluster
1 - SQL Server 2005 sp2 3159 clustered instance

Lab 2:
2 - Dual Quad Core Xeon servers running Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise 64Bit
SAN attached LUNS
MSCS Shared Quorum Cluster
1 - SQL Server 2005 sp2 3159 clustered instance

The kicker with LAB 2 is that the two servers are ~850 miles apart using two different SAN's, but more on that later. Lab 1s configuration went smoothly, having not done iSCSI in a cluster before this install it was a learning experience, but overall very similar to using FC attached disk. The process that Brian has posted for configuring MSDTC in a Cluster was helpful, and worked perfectly.

Lab 2 was slightly more complicated, but only because of having a few more steps; it is using Unisys SafeGuard 30m Clustering. The Unisys documentation was spot-on; it covered every step necessary to configure everything in 30m, as well as MSCS.

Above is the basic configuration for the distance cluster.

The SQL servers have a splitter driver loaded on them that splits all writes to the cluster disk resources to both the SAN and the 30m appliances via the SAN Fabric. The 30m appliances then handle all of the block level replication to the distance SAN, as well as provide control resources to MSCS to make sure all of the disk is consistent prior to brining the resources on-line. The whole system is very cool, and in my opinion under-marketed.

RTFM. Especially if you can't figure it out on your own!

MSCS Clusters, iSCSI, Distance Clusters and SQL 2005