I’m heading home from the August session of Chicago PASS and SSUG meeting.
First off, this was the biggest meeting in Chicago. Over 80 people signed up and for a very good reason.
After a very interesting Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration with Windows PowerShell presentation by The MAK and Yan Pan, Allan Hirt managed to cram the essentials of the new MS Failover Cluster Manager and he made it in less than an hour!
One very interesting and long awaited feature is Live Migration. Basically for the first time you can failover a MS Cluster without dropping any transaction. This is only happening for planned failovers of course but this is a phenomenal achievement for the MS team. Until now any time you would failover a cluster, the operation was the equivalent of stopping the SQLServer service an restarting it on a different machine. Obviously any pending transactions were dropped. With Live Migration the when a planned failover is initiated data from memory is copied over to the new active node and all transactions are seamlessly ported over as well. There might be some performance decrease but no transactions are dropped achieving true High Availability.
And last but not least all this is free with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter
For more information read this blog from Microsoft.
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-release-candidate-free-live-migration-ha-anyone.aspx
Thanks Allan!
It is good to see this blog is finally getting the attention it really deserves Keep up the fantastic work.