MS SQL SERVER DBA

Detailed planning is critical to the success of every SQL Server cluster installation. Fully plan the install before performing the actual install. An expensive cluster is of little value if the supporting infrastructure is not also fault tolerant. or example, don’t forget power redundancy, network redundancy, etc. Run only a single instance of SQL Server per node. Whether you have two or eight nodes in your cluster, leave one node as a failover node. Cluster nodes must not be domain controllers, and all nodes must belong in the same domain and should have access to two or more domain controllers. All cluster hardware must be on the Microsoft Windows Clustering Hardware Compatibility List, and certified to work together as part of a cluster. Since clustering is not designed to protect data (only SQL Server instances), the shared storage device used by the cluster must incorporate f...

Introduction If your mission-critical SQL Server should experience a motherboard failure, how long will it be down? One hour, four hours, a day, or longer? How much will this cost your business in lost sales or productivity? And perhaps even more important to you, what will it do to your stress level? Being a SQL Server DBA can be demanding and stressful, especially as the success of your company is often a function of your SQL Server’s uptime. While we, as DBAs, have some control over the uptime of our SQL Servers, we don’t have full control. There is not much we can do if a motherboard fails on a server, other than be prepared. As you may already be aware, there is one way to help boost your SQL Server’s uptime, and that is by clustering SQL Servers. This way, should one SQL Server fail in the cluster, another clustered server will automatically take over, keeping downtime to minutes, instead of hours or more. The purpose of this article is to ...