Clustering : Best Practices remediation recommendations

Problem: Actually I am not so experienced about cluster and clustered envirnoment. I have been asked by my boss to provide Best Practices remediation recommendations for the SQL clusters in my company. Can you please, help me with it. I would really appreciate it.

Solution:

As per my understanding, to recommend Best Practices for remediation you first need to analyze and document your current cluster configurations viz.

1 Storage Configuration -

• Driver model for storage interface
• Disk redundancy

2 Network Configuration -

• Network interface
• Network priority

3 Security Configuration

• Cluster Service account
• Administrative privileges

4 Operating System Configuration

• Boot environment configuration
• Standardization of service packs, hot fixes, and driver versions

5 SQL Server Pre-Installation Status

• Permission
• Service

6 Cluster Service Configuration

• Resources and groups
• Quorum cluster properties
• Cluster log configuration

7 Disaster Recovery

• Supportability best practices
• Recovery best practices
• Node, cluster, and site recovery procedures.

You can actually compare the configurations with what is recommended by Microsoft. Based on which you have to determine/ document all the possible issues/ problems your current cluster can face and then prepare a document to troubleshoot the problems in the most efficient way.

For doing so, you can also take help of Cluster Diagnostics and Verification Tool (ClusDiag), which can help you to diagnose the possible issues. You might want to run test cases for the same.

Refer to the below links for Best practices and troubleshooting.

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/clustering/clustering_best_practices_p1.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776978(WS.10).aspx http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822250/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181075.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186968.aspx