Ok I have a quick MS SQL clustering question. Now I have little to no MS admin experience. I'm a web developer, and I'm wondering if I should call BS on the IT staff here.
Basically our single SQL server is maxed. CPU runs at about 60%, memory at about 30%, but I think we're maxing out the I/O because the machine locks up whenever we run a script that is heavily DB intensive.
So, we can either replace our single server with something more current. Our current server is about 2.5 years old.
Or I suggested that we could move to a clustered DB environment. Now I've only dealt with clustering a bit in a Linux/MySQL environment. So again, I have pretty much 0 experience administering a MS SQL Server, let alone, an MS cluster.
So the IT guy says that if we decided to go with a cluster, we'd have to scrap our current server all together. According to him, you should cluster with identical hardware. Given that the new machine we purchase wouldn't match our current 2.5 year old box, we'd have to purchase two new machines to setup a clustered environment with 1 Load Balancer and 1 Node.
I personally think this is a bunch of BS. I don't see why the LB would really care what hardware the Nodes were using. I figured there would be some sort of a heartbeat so that the LB knows the load of each Node, and then directs the DB requests accordingly.
So ideally, we would still purchase 2 new boxes, but instead of having 1 LB and 1 Node, we could have 1 LB and 2 Nodes. Then later on we could add the second LB for redundancy, and then just increase the # of nodes as needed.
What do you all think?
Basically our single SQL server is maxed. CPU runs at about 60%, memory at about 30%, but I think we're maxing out the I/O because the machine locks up whenever we run a script that is heavily DB intensive.
So, we can either replace our single server with something more current. Our current server is about 2.5 years old.
Or I suggested that we could move to a clustered DB environment. Now I've only dealt with clustering a bit in a Linux/MySQL environment. So again, I have pretty much 0 experience administering a MS SQL Server, let alone, an MS cluster.
So the IT guy says that if we decided to go with a cluster, we'd have to scrap our current server all together. According to him, you should cluster with identical hardware. Given that the new machine we purchase wouldn't match our current 2.5 year old box, we'd have to purchase two new machines to setup a clustered environment with 1 Load Balancer and 1 Node.
I personally think this is a bunch of BS. I don't see why the LB would really care what hardware the Nodes were using. I figured there would be some sort of a heartbeat so that the LB knows the load of each Node, and then directs the DB requests accordingly.
So ideally, we would still purchase 2 new boxes, but instead of having 1 LB and 1 Node, we could have 1 LB and 2 Nodes. Then later on we could add the second LB for redundancy, and then just increase the # of nodes as needed.
What do you all think?
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