SIOS SANless clusters

SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring

Webinar: Clustering 101: Windows Server 10 High Availability Preview

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Clustering 101 Windows Server 10 High Availability Preview

Webinar: Clustering 101: Windows Server 10 High Availability Preview

On-Demand Webinar: Windows 10 Technical Preview

What You Need To Know About Windows Server 10 Failover Clustering

In this Clustering 101 webinar, Microsoft Cluster MVP Dave Bermingham discusses three compelling new features coming in Microsoft next release of Windows Server, slated for release sometime in 2016. Rolling cluster OS upgrades, Storage Replica and Cloud Witness were all introduced along with their features and use cases.

Register for Clustering 101: Windows Server 10 High Availability Preview

Video: Building a SANless Cluster for SQL Server

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Building a SANless Cluster for SQL Server

Building a SANless Cluster for SQL Server

In this video, Dave Bermingham gives a quick demo on using SIOS Protection Suite for SQL Server.

In the GUI, we configure the protection of your SQL Server to give you high availability and disaster recovery configurations. You see we are connected to 2 servers.  We will walk through the process to create a failover process between primary and secondary servers.

  1. Create Communication Paths:  First thing we want to do is create communication paths, the heartbeats that will detect when there’s a failure of the entire server.  We launch the wizard to choose a communication path and choose the local server first and then the remote server. The type of communication heartbeat we will use is the TCP, or standard heartbeat.  Heartbeat interval determines how often we will send a heartbeat.  We will select the default of 6 seconds.  Maximum heartbeats is how many beats we can miss before we determine a failure has occurred.  The default is 5 seconds.  Essentially after 30 seconds we will determine that a failure has occurred. Finally, we’ll choose the local ip adresses to use for the heartbeat and then complete the wizard.

2. Create Resource Hierarchy: Now that communication heartbeats are established, we will create a resource hierarchy.

  • First we will create an IP resource – the address that application servers will communicate with. We’ll choose the primary server and secondary server and the application we want to protect.  In this example, we are going to choose one on the public network that is not used. The IP resource tag will leave as is. Local recovery – we could failover but will choose now for local recovery in this case. We see that the IP address came online and is associated with the primary server.
  • Next we’ll extend that resource to the secondary server.  The IP address will remain the same. The network we want to use is the public network. We will enable target restore mode also, which is useful when you are failing across a subnet set that are in different subnets. Then we click extend.

3. Create SQL Server Resource & Volume Resource:  Now that we have the IP resource created, we will create the SQL server resource & the volume resource.We will choose the primary and backup server.  The application we want to protect is Microsoft SQL server.  The instance is the primary.  The name looking for is the sa account and the password for the sa account. It queried the instance of SQL Server on this server.  The current databases are all located on the E drive.

4. Create a Mirror:  We can see the SQL Server resource is created on the primary server.  The next step is to extend on the secondary server.  Now it wants to extend the volume E to the secondary server so we’ll create a mirror.  It’s asking us for the endpoints of the mirrors. We set the private network for the replication and then will choose synchronous mirroring for local area networks. Then we create the mirror.

And we will extend the resource to the secondary server.  When we click finish, we will have a fully configured functioning SIOS Protection Suite for SQL Server. We have SQL, the IP and volume all running on primary server and being backed up by the secondary server.

Learn more about SIOS Protection Suite and SQL Server High Availability or request your own free trial today.

Video: The SIOS Clustering Advantage

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The SIOS Clustering Advantage

The SIOS Clustering Advantage

Learn how SIOS clustering software makes protecting applications easy.

Each year, your task is likely to provide higher levels of service using existing infrastructure and a smaller IT budget. Tolerance for downtime or data loss is gone.  Applications have to be up 24/7 and you need to be protected whether that’s a server outage, a networking outage, application outage, or even entire data center loss. The expectation is that the amount of downtime and the amount of data loss converges on “0”.

IT professionals have more options than ever on how you’re going to support your end users whether that’s deployment of physical servers, virtual servers, or even cloud technologies. Choosing a solution comes down to understanding business objectives, technical requirements, and budget limitations as well as needing to understand how you’re going to protect the environment to ensure it is always available and you don’t have any downtime or any data loss.

This is typically done by implementing a traditional SAN based cluster involving two or more servers connected into some type of shared storage. If there is an issue, it will fail the application over and bring everything back online. SIOS software supports this and makes it easy to set up and manage. While a SAN based cluster is great for local high availability, the SAN generally represents high cost, complexity, potential failure in your clustering architecture, and it also doesn’t help you solve the disaster recovery problem.

SIOS software allows you to build out your cluster using your choice of hardware but now leveraging local storage. SIOS provides real-time block level data replication that’s fully cluster aware and integrated allowing you to leverage that very fast local storage with your cluster configuration. Also, adopting a SANLess cluster can reduce the overall cost of the solution by eliminating the SAN. As a result, you’ve not only eliminated the cost of the SAN hardware but also SAN infrastructure and administrative costs that come along with your SAN license savings. In addition, you will be cutting out that single point of failure in your clustering architecture so it won’t take down the entire environment. You can also eliminate data loss because our real-time block level data replication technology keeps the local storage in sync. Provided with the software there is also user friendly wizard-based user interfaces.

To sum things up, SIOS gives you the flexibility to protect your mission-critical applications and data in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.  Learn more about our high availability solutions.