Can Windows Server 2008 MS Failover Cluster be set up without a SAN?

Question

OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Cluster version: Add-on from above OS version

A client has purchased physical servers to set up in a failover configuration using Microsoft Cluster. The desired setup is two Application Servers and two Database Servers with the intention of setting up an Active/Passive cluster using MS Cluster (with each Node consisting of 1 App Server and 1 SQL Server database, see diagram below). However, the Microsoft Active/Passive Cluster setup requires a shared storage to support clustering, and the client no longer supports shared storage as their SAN infrastructure has been retired.

Using Windows Server 2008 R2, is there a way to set up DFS to replicate local directories (e.g. C:\IAS) on both physical App Servers to meet the shared storage requirement? In other words, using two separate boxes running Windows Server 2008 R2 is there a way to setup failover using MS Cluster without a SAN/NAS?

Answer 1

Yeah, 6 months too late and you've probably already found another solution but here we go.

You can use Starwind's iSCSI SAN software. There is a free version of the software, but it is limited to 128GB for High Availability. If your database is small, you could easily get away with the free version. If not, their paid versions are still a lot cheaper compared to implementing a traditional SAN.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/

It is rock solid (I use their Native SAN for Hyper-V 3-node 4TB version for our Hyper-V cluster) and perfect for your two node server.

The software, in effect, turns your exiting two node servers into HA SAN. Just slap in extra hard drive space where needed and make sure you have at least two extra 1GB NIC's per server to handle the replication between servers.