SQL Server® 2008 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond

Installing to a Cluster

If high availability is important for your database server instance, clustering is an excellent choice. Clustering and the steps required to implement it are covered in detail in Chapter 20, "Server Clustering"; however, a brief overview is presented here.

Clustering is a technology that allows more than one physical server to be available for processing a single application. For example, you may implement a SQL Server instance that primarily runs on SERVER32, but SERVER33 is prepped and ready to take over the instance should SERVER32 fail. SQL Server 2008 can be installed to a failover cluster.

In order to implement a SQL Server cluster, several things must be in place. First, you must have the Windows Clustering service ...