Application server farm on SAN? Should it use MSCS?

[Venkatesh M.C.]

Do we need to use a SAN to get two or more server nodes running in a
load-balancing scenario?

Would I need to use MSCS in an active-active (or maybe active-active-active
for 3 nodes) mode? Is it possible to have more than 2 nodes all running
active, through MSCS? I mean, does MSCS support this?

 

[Curtis Koenig [MSFT]]

Hi Vankatesh,
You do not necessarily need a SAN but you will need shared storage for
clustering, that can be a SAN, Shared SCSI, iSCSI or NAS depending on the
cluster provider. However it sounds like you might be interested in Network
Load Balancing (NLB), this does not require shared storage.

The real question is what do you want to do with the cluster. If you want
to balance web traffic then NLB is the better choice. Active/Active
clusters are really only possible with a few applications or in a few very
specific configurations, so if you can provide more information about what
you want to accomplish I am sure I can give you a better recommendation.
The other thing to keep in mind is that MSCS clustering only allows for 2
nodes in Windows 2000 (up to 8 in Windows 2003). NLB allows for up to 32
nodes with all nodes being active.

So there is some base information, now what do you want to do with your
cluster?

--
Curtis Koenig
Support Professional
Microsoft Clustering Technologies Support

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer - Security

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to the newsgroup so that others may benefit. Thanks!

--------------------

 

[JT]

MSCS supports Active/Active clusters (and could do active/active/active),
but each cluster node must have its own physical resources since cluster
nodes do not share resources. You would need to do static/manual load
balancing with MSCS.

Depending upon your application, you could consider using Microsoft's
Network Load Balancing to distribute network traffic to a "server farm" to
even out the load. You can get more info about NLB in the following KB
article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=323437

Regards,
JT