Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

13.4. Analysis Services and Fail-Over Clustering

Both Analysis Services 2008 and 2005 provide fail-over clustering out-of-the-box. By that we mean SQL Server 2005 and 2008 setup supports installing Analysis Services on a Windows clustered environment. You first need to have Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) set up to form a cluster of two or more nodes. We recommend you look at Windows product documentation to set up and configure MSCS. You need to have a shared disk with sufficient disk space that can hold the Analysis Services data files. After setting up a cluster, you can then use Microsoft SQL Server setup to install Analysis Services with fail-over capability. In the SQL Server 2005 setup you need to provide a virtual server name with an IP (Internet Protocol) address and the shared data folder for the Analysis Services data. The virtual server name will be the name of the Analysis Services server. SQL Server 2005 setup installs Analysis Services 2005 binaries on all the nodes of the cluster and the data folder is set up on the shared disk with appropriate permissions. In SQL Server 2008 setup you will need to install Analysis Services on each of the cluster nodes and then use the Cluster UI to create the failover virtual instance based on one of the standalone instances.

Although the setup of clustering has changed between Analysis Services 2005 and 2008, the behavior of the cluster is the same. Figure 13-2 shows the overall architecture of the Analysis Services fail-over ...