Hello,
I would like to know your opinion about running 4-8 SQL 2K
instances on each node of a multi-node (2) cluster, with 8
production databases on each node (spread over the
instances).
Hardware: 2 Pentium 4 2.8 GHz dual processor systems with
2 Gb memory (can be upgraded with processor power and
memory).
Question 1) Possible or something to laugh about?
Question 2) If possible, do you know similar sites?
Thanks, Rinus.

8 Instances on a single server with only 2GB of ram sounds pretty thin.
Unless each instance is a very small database or not heavily used your
probably pushing the memory. What is the reason for wanting individual
instances vs just dbs?



--

Andrew J. Kelly
SQL Server MVP


"Rinus Heer" <Rinus.Heer (AT) Getronics (DOT) com> wrote

Hi -
To answer the question, YES - it is possible to run 16 instances
in a 2 node cluster.
2 GB of RAM sounds less but if you have plans to upgrade this, then it is
fine.
Just a word of caution while you plan for your installation:
You also need to plan running the instances with failover in the top of the
mind. Incase for some reason if node 2 fails, then potentially you may
have all 16 instances running on one node!!

Regards,
Chandra
--------------------

Actually you can run more than 16 instances (only you'll get zero support from MS and you'll also run out of drive letters). The question is not "can I do it?" but really "should I do it?" and "why do I want to do it?" With so little processing power and physical memory performance will really suffer if any of the instances get any sort of reasonable load. Once you know the answer to "why do I want to have so many instances on one cluster?" you'll probably be able to answer the question for yourself. As a general rule, don't add another instance unless you have a very good reason (and there are many good reasons - like security partitioning, reduced downtime for hosted db apps should one or more clustered resource fail, different memory models for different db apps etc)