Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Specifications download pdf (Page 88)

68 CHAPTER 4 High Availability and Virtualization Enhancements

NOTE Guest clustering is also supported when Hyper-V is on Windows Server 2008.

However, Windows Server 2008 R2 provides Live Migration for moving virtual machines

between physical hosts. This is much more benecial for a virtualized environment running

SQL Server 2008 R2.

Real World

hen you use guest failover clustering, make sure that the virtualized guest

operating systems used for the nodes in the guest failover cluster are not

on the same physical Hyper-V host. If this situation exists, you have a physical host

running Hyper-V, which means that you have created a single point of failure. For

example, if a single physical host running all of the guest operating systems sud-

denly failed, all the nodes associated with the guest failover cluster would no longer

be available, ultimately causing the whole SQL Server failover cluster instance to fail.

This could be catastrophic in a mission-critical production environment. This prob-

lem can be avoided, however, if you use multiple Hyper-V hosts and Live Migration,

and ensure that each guest operating system is running on a separate Hyper-V host.

Enhancements to the Validate A Conguration Wizard

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, organizations in the past found it difcult to implement a

SQL Server failover cluster. One thing that clearly stood out was the need for an intuitive tool

that could verify whether or not an organization's conguration met the failover clustering

prerequisites. This issue was addressed with the introduction of Windows Server 2008, which

offered for the rst time a tool called the Validate A Conguration Wizard.

Database administrators and Windows administrators used this tool to conduct validation

tests to determine whether servers, settings, networks, and storage afliated with a failover

cluster were set up correctly. This tool was also used to verify whether or not prerequisite tasks

were met and to conrm that the hardware supported a successful cluster implementation.

The Validate A Conguration Wizard tool included with Windows Server 2008 R2 still

delivers inventory, network, storage, and system conguration tests. In addition, the Failover

Clustering product team made enhancements to the Validate A Conguration Wizard tool

that further improve the testing ability of this tool. Some of the enrichments include the fol-

lowing options:

■

Cluster Conguration

•

List Cluster Core Groups

•

List Cluster Network Information

•

List Cluster Resources

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Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Specifications Page 88