Fail-safe your SQL Server with failover clustering on FlexPod

The concept of database has been said to be the backbone of the modern society, and rightly so. According to Cisco, the world entered the zettabyte era in 2016. And now, the world is producing hundreds of exabytes of data every day. It’ll be futile to generate so much information without having a practical means of precisely and quickly storing and retrieving it when needed. It’s unimaginable to store information on a large scale without having a database management system.

Microsoft offers SQL Server 2022 Enterprise edition with “comprehensive high-end datacenter capabilities with blazing-fast performance, unlimited virtualization, and end-to-end business intelligence, enabling high service levels for mission-critical workloads....”

The FlexPod team has already validated FlexPod for SQL Server 2022. However, SQL Server’s failover clustering feature is so important to the customers of SQL Server that it needs a standalone data center validation of its own.

SQL Server failover clusters ensure built-in disaster recovery and high availability for SQL Server. The feature reduces the risk of mission-critical SQL Server databases going offline during man-made or natural disasters, or during maintenance or downtime of IT infrastructure. SQL Server failover clusters are available in Standard and Enterprise editions.

With the importance of failover clustering in mind, we have carved out a FlexPod^® validated design for SQL Server failover clusters. The “FlexPod with Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Clustering” technical report (TR), published by my colleague Kamini Singh, documents steps for configuring SQL Server 2022 Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) on FlexPod.

FlexPod, jointly offered by Cisco and NetApp, is an industry-leading platform engineered to transform infrastructure and operations. FlexPod enables you to deploy data center infrastructure as a complete system that simplifies and accelerates the deployment of resources in a secure, smart, sustainable, and hybrid-ready platform for all your workloads. The new FlexPod TR proves that by deploying SQL Server failover clusters on FlexPod, it’s easy to reduce the risk of mission-critical SQL Server databases going offline. SQL Server can use Windows Server failover clusters for providing SQL Server Always On failover clusters. Failover clusters are separate SQL Server instances that use a common copy of the SQL Server data.

When failover clusters are deployed on FlexPod, one or more SQL Server instances (nodes) can be grouped as a SQL Server Always On failover cluster such that any one of those nodes can be “active” for providing SQL Server service. When the active node goes offline, the network name of the SQL Server can be assigned to any other SQL Server node in the failover cluster, and then the new node becomes the active SQL Server. This approach provides a seamless SQL Server experience for your business.

The failover cluster feature works synergistically with FlexPod, because FlexPod is a high-availability converged infrastructure. FlexPod uses full-stack redundancy of infrastructural components so that there is no single point of failure. Therefore, even if one instance of the storage is affected, the redundant controller running NetApp ONTAP® takes over to provide seamless storage access to the SQL Server failover cluster.

You can learn more about the hybrid cloud offerings of FlexPod for SQL Server in my colleague Sriram Sagi’s blog, Unlocking the future: FlexPod converged infrastructure for SQL Server and hybrid cloud. Please contact me to find out more about the features that FlexPod offers. And stay tuned for announcements about many more SQL Server features for FlexPod soon.