Clustering only provides the means to ensure you are protected from server hardware failure.
SAN redundancy products, database mirroring, log shipping, or replication to protect you against media failure on your SAN for which clustering fails to protect.
Node failover downtime is usually around 10 secs.
SQL Service stopped, resources released, other node takes ownership of resources, new node sql service starts.
Microsoft does not require you to license the passive node of SQL Server 2005 in an Active-Passive clustered environment.
Windows 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition allows for up to eight nodes to be combined into a single cluster. The release of Windows 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition will bring with it the ability to double that to sixteen nodes.
A cluster node has 2 network cards - 1 for regular corpoate network and 1 for cluster heartbeat.
64 BIT SSAS CLUSTER INSTALL PROCEDURE
* Remote desktop to the active node of the cluster - likely to be an Xservername.
* Look in cluster administrator to verify which node is currently active - the active resources group will contain resources only on the active node.
* Make a not of the ip address\subnet mask for the cluster ip resource in Administrative tools\cluster administrator
* Delete cluster ip resource (clustername_IP)from cluster administrator - this should also delete cluster name resource by default. (this is to free up the ip address for sql server)
* Copy install media locally
* Make sure SP1 is included
* Install just the installation centre
* Apply SP1 (as the non sp install wizard is broken)
* Run SQL Server installation center
* Select Installation\New SQl server failover cluster installation
* Select Features: analysis services, BIDS, client tools connectivity, management tools complete
* Give network name for SSAS cluster - example SSASLON12P10007
* Enter the ip address\ subnet mask noted from cluster administrator.
* Enter relevent csfb\bfidXXXprimoXRW group (this is more reliable if directly typed into the text box and not browsed)
* Enter the account that SSAS will run under - e.g. sysFIDlonPrimoPSvc (This has to be a member of the group given in the previous step)
* Enter groups\users to have ssas admin rights - e.g. bfidlonprimoPmngr
* Ensure data directories are located on the cluster shared drive - normally G:
* Log onto second node and copy install media, and patch the installer as before
* Run Installation\Add node to failover cluster
* After installation of second node test failover by choosing to 'move group' from the context menu of the sql server group in cluster administrator. Services should stop on the active node and restart on the other node.