If you can count the cost of downtime then, depending on these costs to business, you may be able to justify to management the cost of moving to W2K Advanced Server or W2K3 Enterprise Edition and SQL2K Enterprise Edition. Introducing manual processes to simulate High Availaible is a mistake. But you already knew that ;-)

Clustering is an Enterprise Edition feature only.

However, what you outline for a failover scenario will work exactly as you
expect it will. As long as the second SQL Server can gain access to the
data files, the SQL Server will start up cleanly with full access to your
data. The only thing you would have to manage is that your applications
have to be repointed to the new server.

--

Mike
Principal Mentor
Solid Quality Learning
"More than just Training"
SQL Server MVP
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com
http://www.mssqlserver.com

I can completely understand the cost factor of implementing the cluster.
But the bigger question that needs to be asked is - does the downtime and
loss of productivity justify the savings or a workaround for NOT
implementing high availability clustering ? I guess, the mere fact that
your company is looking at clustering is that they value the high
availability aspect of running a database application and they value the
money lost in terms of lost productivity. From now onwards, it would be a
question of justifying the cost-benefit scenario to your BDMs.

If you try to manually point the database to the shared disk, its possible,
but why would you like to do that? There will be a lot of contingencies to
consider and plan for if we go the manual way.

I would sugges that you have a look at this link

MS SQL Server 2000 High Availability Series
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...y/sqlhalp.mspx

This is written for both Business and Technical folks and could give you
possible pointers on how you can achieve the functionality by justifying
the costs.

Hope this helps.

Sanchan [MSFT]

sanchans (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.