Building a HA Cluster

cipher

Hi there,

some say that it is quite impossibel to set up a HA Cluster for Navision and some say it works.

Here is waht I'd like to setup for our Navision:

2 SAN's with SSD's (total capacity of each Raid-10 will be 500GB)
Both SAN's have 2 DualPort FC's with 8Gbps

The SAN's will be managed with DataCore SanMelody

http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody.asp

What are your suggestions? Will that work?

I am new to Navision and especially the C/Side Database which I'd like to move into a HA Storage System!

All tips, hints and suggestions are highly appreciated!

Thanks and Regards
Cipher

cipher

Hi again!

Is there no one around who might tell me, whether my considered setup will work or not?

Would be just awesome, if someone who built already an HA Cluster vor Navision 5.01SP1 would reply!

Thanks and regards
Cipher

David_Singleton

Help you with what? What might help? What will it help with? What are you trying to achieve? Why do you need this level of Availability? How large is your system? What have you tried so far?

If you post absolutely ZERO ZICH NADA NIC what do you expect for an answer?

The only thing that is clear from your post is that you want to spend lots of money.

As a comparison its like going to a Auto forum and posting that you are going to buy a new car with xyz horsepower and abc turbo charger and super duppa go fast GT stripes and asking if the car will suit your purposes, yet you have not said if you are Michael Schumacher or a Taxi driver, or Mrs Smith wanting to drive the kids to soccer.

Decide WHAT you need THEN decide HOW you will do it. DOn't start with a premise of WHAT you want and then will it do the job.

David_Singleton

Just to follow up.

On a public voluntary community forum, its very rude to bump a post. Its like demanding that someone reply's, even though you are not paying anything.

In this case there are more issues, 1/ that its your first post 2/ that you provided no information.

The community will help you, but first post all the details second be patient.

cipher

Hi David!

Okay, I might have said clearer or more precise what I'd like to achieve with that kind of setup:

We have a ERP - System which is built on Navision 5.01SP1. Our DB is already ~240Gig large and we have until now no redundancy. The company who has developed that system has told us that there is no way to get real redundnacy neither nor a HA System which will work as like as we want it. The only thing that we can do say said ist to make hourly backups and if the system might crash, well we would have "only" a loss of data from the last hour. That doesn't satisfy us at all. The next thing why we want such a setup is that we will virtualize most of our servers. Basically only the SSD's will be used for the Database, the other disks will be used for servers and applications.

I hope that I have clearified the situation a bit and that one of you might tell me now whether it is possible to have Navision installed on a virtualized HA storagesystem or not.

Thanks for your answer and sorry for not being precise enough in my first post!

Regards
Cipher

David_Singleton

So what have SSDs got to do with it? Are you using these for performance or security or another reason?

It's hard to believe you have NO redundancy what so ever. Surely you have at least a RAID. Can't you at least set up Log Shipping every 15 minutes as a stop gap.

And you still give no indication of size of your system. Transaction volume no of users, external data imports, is it retail manufacturing whole sale warehousing.

There are so many important analysis steps that you have not done. You need to do those first; how long can you afford your system to be down and at what cost are you willing to pay. How much data can you afford to lose. If you say "we can't lose any data or have any down time, then expect to spend some money" There are orders of magnitude cost between 1 minute and 15 minutes. Think how expensive is your data. How much would it cost to re-enter 15 minutes of lost work.

There is a lot needed to design a system like this, yet your design seems to be based on SSDs where it should be based on the needs of the business.

I have one client that has HA probably what you are after, but the server costs well over 1 mill EUR, are you willing to spend that sort of money? I have another client with about a 15 min worst case lost data, and no more than 2 hours down time and they spent less than $25,000.


<edited ... yes bumping in 24 hours pisses me off and I probably over reacted>

David_Singleton

cipher wrote:

The company who has developed that system has told us that there is no way to get real redundnacy neither nor a HA System which will work as like as we want it.

That makes no sense. Either your expectations are two high, your budget too low, or they did not understand your requirements.

cipher wrote:

well we would have "only" a loss of data from the last hour. That doesn't satisfy us at all.

Here is a good starting point. At least you know what is NOT acceptable, now just to define what IS acceptable.

cipher wrote:

...you might tell me now whether it is possible to have Navision installed on a virtualized HA storagesystem or not.

Yes its possible. But what do you want. BUT you just changed the topic here. You started talking about a High Availability Navision CLUSTER, now you are talking about a High Availability Storage System. If its just he Storage you are worried about, then that's much simpler.