Storage Foundation and High Availability 8.0.2 Solutions Microsoft Clustering Solutions Guide for Microsoft SQL Server - Windows
- Introducing SFW solutions for a Microsoft cluster
- Planning for deploying SQL Server with SFW in a Microsoft cluster
- Workflows for deploying SQL Server with SFW in a Microsoft cluster
- Configuring SFW storage
- Tasks for configuring InfoScale Storage
- Planning for SFW cluster disk groups and volumes
- Considerations when creating disk groups and volumes for a campus cluster
- Considerations when creating volumes for a DR configuration using Volume Replicator replication
- Viewing the available disk storage
- Creating dynamic cluster disk groups
- Adding disks to campus cluster sites
- Creating dynamic volumes for high availability clusters
- Creating dynamic volumes for campus clusters
- Implementing a dynamic mirrored quorum resource
- Installing SQL Server and configuring resources
- Configuring disaster recovery
- Tasks for configuring the secondary site for disaster recovery for SQL Server
- Verifying the primary site configuration
- Creating a parallel environment for SQL Server on the secondary site
- Volume Replicator components overview
- Setting up security for Volume Replicator
- Creating resources for Volume Replicator
- Configuring Volume Replicator: Setting up an RDS
- Creating the RVG resource
- Setting the SQL server resource dependency on the RVG resource
- Normal Volume Replicator operations and recovery procedures
- Appendix A. Configure InfoScale Storage in an existing Microsoft Failover Cluster
Planning your campus cluster configuration
The procedures for setting up a campus cluster are nearly the same as those for local clusters, with the following differences:
A campus cluster has the nodes located in separate buildings. Therefore, the hardware setup requires SAN interconnects that allow these connections.
In a campus cluster, each node has its own storage array rather than having a shared storage array between the two clusters.
Both local clusters and campus clusters have SFW dynamic disk groups and volumes, but the volumes on each campus cluster node are mirrors of one another.
Each disk group must contain the same number of disks on each site for the mirrored volumes.
More information is available on disk group and volume configuration.
Although a campus cluster setup with Microsoft clustering can work without InfoScale Storage, InfoScale Storage provides key advantages over using Microsoft clustering alone. Through a dynamic mirrored volume that functions on multiple disks across multiple sites, SFW protects the quorum resource in the cluster from being the single point of failure in the cluster.
Most customers use hardware RAID to protect the quorum disk, but that does not work when a natural disaster takes down the primary node and its attached storage. If the quorum resource is lost to the cluster, the cluster fails, because none of the cluster servers can gain control of the quorum resource and ultimately the cluster. Microsoft clustering alone cannot provide fault tolerance to the quorum disk.
The following figure shows a Microsoft campus cluster configuration with mirrored storage across clusters and a mirrored quorum resource. The 4-way mirrored quorum has an extra set of mirrors for added redundancy.
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