Pros and Cons of Veritas Clustering vs SQL Native Clustering

Can the clustering gurus and users provide their experiences?

Thanks

 

VCS has a pretty good reputation on Unix/Linux. On Windows, I don't see any
need or reason for using VCS if all you want to do is to cluster SQL Server.
MSCS is good enough (for my needs anyway), and won't give you any of the
cross-vendor support hassles that you may run into with VCS. Plus, MSCS comes
with Windows.

Is there anything specific in VCS that you may want to take advantage of? If
not, why bother? It just adds complexity.

Linchi

 

There will be a lot of manual work involved in SQL installation on VCS. For
example, SQL does not recognize VCS cluster and hence 'Virtual Server'
option is not enabled during the install. So, you have to install SQL
manually on all the nodes. Same is the case while applying SPs, patches etc.

But, there is lot of flexibilty with VCS cluster. You can configure so many
options that are not available in MSCS. For example, you can write your
monitoring script and have VCS use it for polling SQL server.

 

At the end of the day, do they both do their job without any major issues ?

 

Yes, if properly configured.

 

Well not really. There should have been two questions:

1. Does MS failover clustreing meet most, if not all, of my failover
clustering requirements?
2. When things happen, can I get the same level of support with VCS as I do
MSCS?

For me, the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the 2nd
question is probably not. And supportability should be one of the key
decision factors.

Linchi