Glossary: IT Analytics

Glossary of Terms: IT Analytics

Definition: IT infrastructure refers to the analysis of data from the hardware, software, network, storage, application and compute resources. IT professionals use IT analytics to ensure their infrastructure is optimized, Service Level Agreements are met and that application performance is maintained for end users.

Reproduced from SIOS

Glossary: Infrastructure Monitoring

Glossary of Terms: Infrastructure Monitoring

Definition: IT infrastructure monitoring connects data from a wide variety of IT devices and applications to ensure IT infrastructure is running within optimal parameters.

Reproduced from SIOS

Glossary: High Availability

Glossary of Terms: High Availability

Definition: A system or application that is continuously operational. High Availability can be measured in terms of percentage of uptime relative to 100% uptime (operational). An application or server said to have “five 9s” high availability has 99.999 percent uptime.

Reproduced from SIOS

How To Extend Your Existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance To The Cloud For Disaster Recovery

How To Extend Your Existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance To The Cloud For Disaster Recovery

Typically I point them to this DataKeeper documentation when someone asks me how to do extend existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance to the Cloud for Disaster Recovery.

This first document talks about extending the cluster and adding a 3rd node to the existing cluster. That’s fine if your cluster supports three nodes. But if you are using SQL Server Standard Edition, Microsoft limits you to a 2-node cluster. In the case of a 2-node cluster. you can still replicate to a 3rd node. Bear in mind the recovery will be more of a manual process. This process is described here.

People typically read these instructions and get a little worried. They feel like they would be performing open heart surgery on their cluster. It really is more like changing your shirt! You are simply replacing the Cluster Disk resource with a DataKeeper Volume resource. As you’ll see in the video below the process takes just a few seconds.

The code demonstrated in the video is show below.

Stop-ClusterGroup SQLServerGroup
Remove-ClusterResource -Name "Cluster Disk 1"
Set-Disk -Number 4 -IsOffline $False
Set-Disk -Number 4 -IsReadOnly $False
Import-Module -Name Storage
Set-Partition -DiskNumber 4 
-PartitionNumber 1 -NewDriveLetter X
New-DataKeeperMirror -SourceIP 10.0.2.100 
-SourceVolume X -TargetIP 10.0.1.10 -TargetVolume X -SyncType Sync
New-DataKeeperJob -JobName "x drive" 
-JobDescription "sql data" -Node1Name primary.datakeeper.local 
-Node1IP 10.0.2.100 -Node1Volume x 
-Node2Name dr.datakeeper.local -Node2IP 10.0.1.10 
-Node2Volume X -SyncType Sync
Add-ClusterResource -Name "DataKeeper Volume X" 
-ResourceType "DataKeeper Volume" -Group "SQLServerGroup"
Get-ClusterResource "DataKeeper Volume X" | Set-ClusterParameter 
VolumeLetter X
Get-ClusterResource -Name 'SQLServer' | Add-ClusterResourceDependency 
-Provider 'DataKeeper Volume X'
Start-ClusterGroup SQLServerGroup 

After you run that code don’t forget you also need to click on Manage Shared Volumes to add the backup node to the DataKeeper job as shown in the video.

If you have SQL Server Enterprise Edition then the final step would be to install SQL Server in the DR node and choose add node to existing cluster.

If you are using SQL Server Standard Edition then your job is done. You would simply follow these instructions to access you data on the 3rd node and then mount the replicated databases.

These directions are applicable whether your DR node is in the Cloud or your own DR site.

Glossary: Geoclustering

Glossary of Terms: Geoclustering

Definition: Geoclustering is the practice of geographically separating high availability cluster nodes for disaster recovery protection.

In a high availability cluster, important applications are run on a primary server node that is connected to one or more secondary nodes in a cluster. If application operation fails on the primary node, cluster software orchestrates failover of the application operation to the secondary node (s). If the primary and secondary nodes are located in the same geographical location, any risks to that location (eg. fire, flood, natural disaster) threatens the entire cluster.

By locating cluster nodes in multiple different physical locations, a geocluster enables application operation to continue through local downtime incidents and natural disasters.

Reproduced from SIOS