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

Last Published: 2025-04-13

Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation (9.0)

Platform: Windows

Workflow for a disaster recovery configuration

After creating a high-availability cluster on a primary site, you can install and configure InfoScale Storage and SQL Server on a secondary site cluster for disaster recovery.

This disaster recovery solution requires Volume Replicator.

Table: Process for deploying SQL Server with SFW and Volume Replicator for disaster recovery in a Microsoft cluster

Action	Description
Ensure that you have set up the primary site for high availability, including the required options for disaster recovery	For details on setting up high-availability on the primary site: See Workflow for a high availability (HA) configuration.
Review the prerequisites and planning information	Verify the prerequisites on the secondary site. See InfoScale requirements for Microsoft clustering solutions. Note: If the DR site is on a different network segment, ensure that you allocate two IP addresses for the virtual server, one for the primary site and one for the DR site. Understand the DR configuration. See Planning your disaster recovery configuration.
Review how to create a parallel high availability configuration on the secondary site	Ensure that you follow the secondary site requirements and guidelines for IP addresses, disk groups and volumes, the SQL Server resource group, and SQL Server installation. See Creating a parallel environment for SQL Server on the secondary site.
Configure the storage hardware and network	Set up the storage hardware for a cluster environment. Verify the DNS entries for the systems on which SQL will be installed. See Configuring the storage hardware and network.
Establish a Microsoft cluster	Establish the cluster before installing InfoScale Storage.
Install InfoScale Storage with the Microsoft Failover Cluster option	Refer to the Arctera InfoScale™ Installation and Upgrade Guide.
Configure and manage disk groups and volumes	Use the VEA console to create disk groups and volumes. Make sure the following is exactly the same as the cluster on the primary site: Disk group name Volume names and sizes Drive letters See Tasks for configuring InfoScale Storage. Note: Setting up a Microsoft failover cluster creates physical disk resources for all the basic disks on the shared bus. To use these disks when you create your SFW cluster disk groups, you must first remove the physical disk resources from the cluster. Otherwise, a reservation conflict occurs.
Implement a dynamic mirrored quorum resource	Create a dynamic cluster disk group with a mirrored volume for the quorum disks. Create a Volume Manager Disk Group (VMDG) resource for the quorum disk group. Change the cluster quorum resource to the dynamic mirrored quorum resource. See Tasks for implementing a dynamic mirrored quorum resource.
Create the SQL virtual server group	Create a SQL Server cluster group. Ensure that it has the same name as on the primary site. Add the VMDG disk group resource(s). See Creating the resource group for the SQL Server instance.
Install SQL Server	Before starting the SQL installation on the secondary site, note the following requirements: Make sure that you take the SQL Server Network Name resource offline on the primary site. This will also offline the dependent resources. Mount the disk group and volumes created for the data files on the node where you install. During installation, specify the same name for the SQL virtual server as that on the primary site. Ensure that you install the data files to the path of the dynamic volume on shared storage. See Installing SQL Server in an InfoScale Storage environment.
Set up security for Volume Replicator	Set up the security for Volume Replicator on all nodes on both the primary and secondary sites. See Setting up security for Volume Replicator.
Understand the Volume Replicator components	See Volume Replicator components overview.
Create the cluster resources for Volume Replicator	Create an IP address for the Replicated Volume Group (RVG). Create a Network Name resource for the Replicated Volume Group (RVG). See Creating resources for Volume Replicator.
Set up an RDS	Create a replicated data set (RDS) using the Volume Replicator wizard. See Configuring Volume Replicator: Setting up an RDS.
Create the RVG resource (primary and secondary sites)	Create the RVG resource on both primary and secondary sites. See Creating the RVG resource.
Set up the SQL Server resource dependencies	Change the SQL Server resource properties so that it depends on the RVG resource instead of the Volume Manager Disk Group resource. See Setting the SQL server resource dependency on the RVG resource.