InfoScale™ 9.0 Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions Microsoft Clustering Solutions Guide for Microsoft SQL Server - Windows

Last Published:
Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation (9.0)
Platform: Windows
  1. Introducing SFW solutions for a Microsoft cluster
    1.  
      About Microsoft clustering solutions with SFW
    2.  
      Advantages of using SFW in a Microsoft cluster
    3.  
      About high availability clusters
    4.  
      About campus clusters
    5.  
      About disaster recovery clusters
  2. Planning for deploying SQL Server with SFW in a Microsoft cluster
    1.  
      InfoScale requirements for Microsoft clustering solutions
    2. Planning your SQL Server high availability configuration
      1.  
        Sample high availability configuration for SQL Server with SFW
      2.  
        Configuring the quorum device for high availability
    3. Planning your campus cluster configuration
      1.  
        Microsoft campus cluster failure scenarios
      2. Microsoft cluster quorum and quorum arbitration
        1.  
          Quorum
        2.  
          Cluster ownership of the quorum resource
        3.  
          The vxclus utility
    4. Planning your disaster recovery configuration
      1.  
        Sample disaster recovery configuration for SQL Server with SFW and Volume Replicator
  3. Workflows for deploying SQL Server with SFW in a Microsoft cluster
    1.  
      Workflow for a high availability (HA) configuration
    2. Workflow for a campus cluster configuration
      1.  
        Campus cluster: Connecting the two nodes
    3.  
      Workflow for a disaster recovery configuration
    4.  
      Using the Solutions Configuration Center workflow
    5.  
      Configuring the storage hardware and network
  4. Configuring SFW storage
    1.  
      Tasks for configuring InfoScale Storage
    2. Planning for SFW cluster disk groups and volumes
      1.  
        Sample SQL Server high-availability cluster storage configuration
      2.  
        Sample campus cluster storage configuration
      3.  
        Sample SQL Server disaster recovery storage configuration
    3.  
      Considerations when creating disk groups and volumes for a campus cluster
    4.  
      Considerations when creating volumes for a DR configuration using Volume Replicator replication
    5.  
      Viewing the available disk storage
    6.  
      Creating dynamic cluster disk groups
    7.  
      Adding disks to campus cluster sites
    8.  
      Creating dynamic volumes for high availability clusters
    9.  
      Creating dynamic volumes for campus clusters
  5. Implementing a dynamic mirrored quorum resource
    1.  
      Tasks for implementing a dynamic mirrored quorum resource
    2.  
      Creating a dynamic cluster disk group and a mirrored volume for the quorum resource
    3.  
      Adding a Volume Manager Disk Group resource for the quorum
    4.  
      Changing the quorum resource to a dynamic mirrored quorum resource
  6. Installing SQL Server and configuring resources
    1.  
      Tasks for installing and configuring SQL Server
    2.  
      Creating the resource group for the SQL Server instance
    3.  
      Prerequisites for installing SQL Server
    4.  
      Installing SQL Server in an InfoScale Storage environment
    5.  
      Dependency graph for SQL Server
    6.  
      Verifying the SQL Server group in the Microsoft cluster
  7. Configuring disaster recovery
    1.  
      Tasks for configuring the secondary site for disaster recovery for SQL Server
    2.  
      Verifying the primary site configuration
    3.  
      Creating a parallel environment for SQL Server on the secondary site
    4.  
      Volume Replicator components overview
    5.  
      Setting up security for Volume Replicator
    6.  
      Creating resources for Volume Replicator
    7. Configuring Volume Replicator: Setting up an RDS
      1.  
        Prerequisites for setting up the RDS
      2.  
        Creating a Replicated Data Set (RDS)
    8.  
      Creating the RVG resource
    9.  
      Setting the SQL server resource dependency on the RVG resource
    10. Normal Volume Replicator operations and recovery procedures
      1.  
        Monitoring the status of the replication
      2.  
        Performing planned migration
      3. Replication recovery procedures
        1.  
          Bringing up the application on the secondary host
        2.  
          Restoring the primary host
  8. Appendix A. Configure InfoScale Storage in an existing Microsoft Failover Cluster
    1.  
      Configuring InfoScale Storage in an existing Microsoft Failover Cluster

Considerations when creating disk groups and volumes for a campus cluster

When you create the disk groups for a campus cluster, ensure that each disk group has the same number of disks on each physical site. You create each volume as a mirrored volume with one plex of the volume on Site A's storage array and the other plex of the volume on Site B's storage array.

Arctera recommends using the SFW site-aware allocation feature for campus cluster storage. Site-aware allocation can ensure that site boundary limits are maintained for operations like volume grow, subdisk move, and disk relocation.

Enabling site-aware allocation for campus clusters requires the following steps in the VEA:

  • After creating the disk groups, you tag the disks with site names to enable site-aware allocation. This is a separate operation, referred to in the VEA as adding disks to a site.

    As an example, say you had a disk group with four disks. Disk1 and Disk2 are physically located on Site A. Disk3 and Disk4 are physically located on Site B. Therefore, you add Disk1 and Disk2 to "site_a" and add Disk3 and Disk4 to "site_b".

  • During volume creation, you specify the volume site type as Site Separated. This ensures that the volume is restricted to the disks on the selected site.

Note:

The hot relocation operation does not adhere to site boundary restrictions. If hot relocation causes the site boundary to be crossed, then the Site Separated property of the volumes is changed to Siteless. This is done so as not to disable hot relocation. To restore site boundaries later, you can relocate the data that crossed the site boundary back to a disk on the original site and then change back the properties of the affected volumes.

For more information on site-aware allocation, refer to the Storage Foundation Administrator's Guide.

When you create the volumes for a campus cluster, consider the following:

  • During disk selection, configure the volume as "Site Separated" and select the two sites of the campus cluster from the site list.

  • For volume attributes, select the "mirrored" and "mirrored across enclosures" options.

  • Arctera recommends using either simple mirrored (concatenated) or striped mirrored options for the new volumes. Striped mirrored gives you better performance compared to concatenated.

    When selecting striped mirrored, select two columns in order to stripe one enclosure that is mirrored to the second enclosure.

  • During the volume creation procedure for Site Separated volumes, you can only create as many mirrors as there are sites. However, once volume creation is complete, you can add additional mirrors if desired.

  • Choosing "mirrored" and the "mirrored across" option without having two enclosures that meet requirements causes new volume creation to fail.

  • You cannot select RAID-5 for mirroring.

  • Selecting "stripe across enclosures" is not recommended because then you need four enclosures, instead of two.

  • Logging can slow performance.