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August 30, 2008 12:14am pdt
 
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Microsoft Cluster Server disk question

Tags: Microsoft, Cluster Server, 2003-2008
I need some clarificaton about microsoft cluster server.
I am looking at setting up an active/passive cluster to host SQL 2005.
I am going to use either 2003 or 2008 datacenter.
We have a SAN but were not planning on using it to hose the shared array.
Each of the two servers have 6 76GB drives which will provide enough storage with RAID 5, the servers
have 2 NICS and a fibre card each.

My first though is to  setup iSCSI for one RAID 5 array over the fibre cards leaving one nic for the heartbeat and once nic for public traffic.  The problem I see with this is that I now have a set of drives in one server doing nothing and I don't have true failover because the shared disk array is housed by one of the nodes.

Am I understanding this correctly?  Is is possible to mirror the RAID 5 arrays in each of the nodes and have true failover or must I put my data and quorum partitions on our SAN ?

We are currently using an old product called LEGATO co-standby server which I believe is real time replicating data between two raid arrays in the servers over fibre.  Can microsoft cluster server behave the same way so I can leverage my local drives in the servers?
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Question Stats
Zone: OS
Question Asked By: hscdsb
Solution Provided By: rodriguesp
Participating Experts: 1
Solution Grade: B
Views: 12
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