This is a preventative question, before I proceed down a road that may be full of headaches.
We have a two-server DSA deployment, both on Server 2003, 64-bit and SQL 2005 enterprise 64-bit.
For Business Continuity, I’m looking at adding a third and fourth server to the architecture and here’s the question:
Is BigFix sensitive to variations in the underlying system infrastructure? That is, can I add a BigFix Server running on a 32-bit version of Server 2003 and SQL enterprise 2005? Will there be any performance concerns with non-identical servers?
I realize the only posted consideration is a consistent version of SQL Server, are there any others?
There isn’t a problem mixing 32 and 64 bit architecture but you can not have mismatched SQL Server versions.
We would be worried about the situation though because it sounds like you are going to be mixing in hardware that may not have the same performance levels as the existing hardware and this may cause you problems. It could even slow down the other DSA servers which are trying to pull data off of the slow machines. Just something to be mindful of.
In my case the mismatched servers is a temporary thing until we can get 2 new servers in place.
Can you mix SQL 2005 Enterprise SP2 with SQL 2005 Standard SP2? Again, this will be temporary until 2 new servers can be installed and the old one removed.
SQL 2005 Enterprise should be fine to use with Standard from a technical perspective but again you have the same risk of performance issues. Here’s a comparison of the features:
My reason for mixing the servers is we have our original BigFix server which is about 5 years old (running SQL 2005 Enterprise). We were planning on using DSA to add 2 new identical servers running SQL Server 2005 Standard, promote one to the master server, then remove the old server. The plan was to have the the mismatched hardware for about a month or so. Do you think this would be OK, or will performance issues get in our way?
I couldn’t say without looking at the full specs for the computers but it certainly doesn’t sound right. You are moving from 2 DSA servers that are x64 with SQL 2005 Enterprise to 2DSA servers that are x32 and using SQL 2005 Standard? The move off of x64 and SQL Enterprise doesn’t sound right, why aren’t the new servers using x64 and SQL Enterprise? There are obviously a lot of other factors that go into performance (like the RAID arrays, the number of CPU’s and the amount of memory) that need to be factored in.
Also, the OS might limit your memory usage if you aren’t using Win2003 Enterprise.
Sorry for the confusion. We are implementing a 2 server DSA for the first time and bought 2 new servers. The existing configuration is a single 32bit server that will be replaced. The new servers will be 64bit Server 2003 Standard, with 64bit SQL 2005 Standard. The 2 new servers will replace the single server that we recently upgraded from SQL 2000 Enterprise to SQL 2005 Enterprise. I believe the confusion came from the fact that we are switching from Enterprise to Standard in the new setup to save some money since we don’t really need Enterprise edition.
The new servers are definitely faster across the board (Memory, CPU, and RAID Arrays.) Originally we were planning on leaving the original server in the 3 server DSA configuration for a month before removing the old server. Will the mismatched performance matter that much for this temporary time frame? I understand it may not be as fast during this period, but will this cause any errors or instability?
Thank you for clarifying that, I understand better now. Ok, so the short answer is yes, it could cause instability even during the temporary time period. Basically, DSA functionality means that your existing server has more work to do because other servers are pulling data from it. If your current server doesn’t have capacity to keep up with the work load, you’ll see reports from clients become slower and users may complain that the system is too slow. The overhead on the existing server should be pretty low, basically the other servers just need to read data off of it and there is already lots of reading coming from Consoles so it shouldn’t be very much more.
If your current server has borderline performance, enabling DSA on top of it may cause problems for you and you would be better off doing a clean break where you take the existing server offline for an hour and swap in a replacement. If the current server is performing well then you shouldn’t have a problem and doing the DSA switch over will work well.