Hi,

I am going to start with "putting the pieces" together and making them work before i can go ahead and play around with our on site production servers. OFF SITE i have to come up with some contraptions that "works" as a cluster solution. and by doing this i become more familiar with the steps

So is there an other way to set up clustering .. by putting the Pieces Together ... the problem is what pieces ??

To be supported, a cluster has to be sold as a cluster solution. You cannot
just put pieces together as a cluster and have it supported as a cluster by
Microsoft.. With that said, the shared dirve will have to be a physical
drive that can be shared between the computers. It cannot be the shared
drive on a remote computer. The drive will have to be seen as an attached
drive byt the cluster service or it will not use it.

Rand
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

If all you are looking for is a demo or training aid, you can build a
CheapCluster(TM).

Take any two machines P-II 400 or better, plug an extra NIC and a SCSI
adapter into each. Connect a SCSI drive or two in an external storage
array, load the OS, configure as a cluster and go. It won't be very stable
and it is completely unsupported, but it makes a great training and demo
tool. Do NOT attempt to run any real work on such a system.

Some people use VMWare to build a virtual cluster, but I haven't tried that
myself.

--
Geoff N. Hiten
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Senior Database Administrator
Careerbuilder.com

I support the Professional Association for SQL Server
www.sqlpass.org

[quoted text, click to view]
work before i can go ahead and play around with our on site production
servers. OFF SITE i have to come up with some contraptions that "works" as a
cluster solution. and by doing this i become more familiar with the steps.
[quoted text, click to view]

Hi,

I want to test the clustering environment before implementing the same on
production servers. The resources i have with me are high end ( p4 2G ,
512MB RAM ) personal computers. I can install 2k3 on two systems .. what do
i use for "shared storage".. can i use the shared drive of another desktop
computer on the same network as "shared disk array"... please help me out as
i have to give a presentation regarding the same...

Regards,

Navket Singh Naru
DBA

You may wish to register for the Virtual Server 2005 Beta program. With this product you can simulate a W2K3 Server Cluster. Although it isn't a replacement for hardware in a production environment it may help you get a better understanding off what hardware devices you'll need and how clustering works. You can run it on almost any PIII/PIV/Xeon single or multi-processor server

[quoted text, click to view]
I've done exactly this for training. Two P-II 400 systems, 2 Nics in each,
Adaptec 2940 in each and a bunch of 4GB disks in an external box connected
to both adapters. Just have to be careful about powering up nodes until the
clustering software is setup.

[quoted text, click to view]

For training, demo, support purposes, one could setup a cluster using Virtual Server 2005. You are in luck as recently a whitepaper to setup a cluster using Virtual Server
2005 is published. Here is the link

Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to Create and Configure a Two-Node Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Cluster
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/virtualserver/deploy/cvs2005.mspx


On my laptop that has Windows XP Pro, I have a Win2K3 DC and two Win2K3 member servers configured as a two node cluster using Virtual Server 2005. Yeah, Virtual
Server 2005 is not supported on XP but I am using for testing and not production. Infact I was able to install SQL Server 2000 clustered instance and SP3a on the virtual
cluster without any issues.

HTH,

Best Regards,

Uttam Parui
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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