Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you could offer me some help with my cluster.
I've been dropped in the deep end and currently experiencing a serious
'in the deep end' moment.

We have the requirement to emulate a setup whereby two (or more)
machines are going to be clustered together to run SQL Server as a
cluster service for numerous web servers. We have little to no
experience in-house for this kind of configuration, only plain SQL
Server installations previously.

So far I have managed to install Windows Server 2003 Enterprise on both
machines and create a cluster consisting of them both. Without a disk
capable of connecting to both machines at once I have opted for a
majority node set since this allows two nodes with their own disk
resources. (Was this the right choice?)

The cluster seems to be up and running without any problems, except for
a warning that only one NIC is present and is a single point of
failure. I'm not too worried about this since we're not going to be in
a production environment.

When installing SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition everything progresses
just fine when I specify a new Virtual Server and move through to
picking an IP for it. On the next screen, though, it asks for the
cluster disk where the files will be placed... this screen has no disks
to choose from so I cannot progress any further with the installation.

Can anyone suggest where I might have gone wrong or what I should do to
resolve the problem? I should admit that this is the first time I've
tried to cluster two machines and install SQL Server in a clustered
environment and I'm trying to learn using only pages I find on the
Internet. However, I do have a good understanding of Windows
environments in general.

Any help is gratefully received! Thanks!

Richard.

As you just found out SQL Server 2000 does not work with MNS Clustering. You
have to have a shared disk. Sorry about that, glad you tested it out first


Cheers,

Rod

MVP - Windows Server - Clustering
http://www.nw-america.com - Clustering Website
http://msmvps.com/clustering - Blog

"Horseman_UK" <horseman_uk (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Rod,

Thanks for your help, very much appreciated. Is there a specific reason
why SQL Server 2000 doesn't work on MSNC other than it was produced
three years before Windows Server 2003 came out? Is there a
knowledgebase entry about this because I failed to find one whilst
searching for hours and hours. ;o)

Cheers!
Richard.

I have not seen a Q on SQL and MNS.

Cheers,

Rod

MVP - Windows Server - Clustering
http://www.nw-america.com - Clustering Website
http://msmvps.com/clustering - Blog

"Horseman_UK" <horseman_uk (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Win2k3 majority node set clustering does not provide a mechanism to mirror
or replicate user data across nodes in the matrix and sql2k (ms dbms) is a
share-nothing model. Thus, a sharedisk is required.

--
-oj


"Horseman_UK" <horseman_uk (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

"Horseman_UK" wrote
all the time to keep the majority (above 50%) of qourum disks available
The recommendation says three nodes at least

MNS will not work for MSSQL as you need to have a shared disk for databases
etc

MSSQL 2K DE does not support clustering (afaik)
You need the Enterprise version for this

If you need to have an MSSQL cluster up and running for test purposes and
would like to avoid the extra HW costs I can recommend either MS Virtuel
Server or VMWare either Server or the new Desktop version
For all of them you are able to configure clusters with shared SCSI disks

HTH