Hey Folks,
I currently have 2 physical machines for my SQL environment:
Primary: Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2 (with Service Pack 3) **Production*. machine has 40gb physical memory.
Secondary: Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2 (with Service Pack 3) **Warm stand-by ...with regular Log Shipping backups/restore* . machine has 16GB physical memory.
I want to upgrade from a log shipping strategy into a SQL server clustering strategy because word on the street is sql clustering allows automatic failover and would make my future vacation days less stressfull.
Can i build a virtual machine (esxi) with same OS and SQL version (sp level) and make that as part of the cluster? Do i need to get additional licensing? What is the danger of doing SQL clustering if not done right the first-time?