Hmm. We have a couple of early-model Itanium1's here which we used to help with some performance problems with the x86 emulation on the processor (for DOS Ghost, since it was used for manufacturing) but I don't think it's a platform we've done any specific compatibility testing for with the GSS console and client pieces, and I actually don't think we've done specific compatibility testing with the clustered edition of Server 2003 either.
Out of curiosity, what role are you wanting to use GSS in with your cluster; console client, console server, or manually ghosting? I'm not super-confident that the client code will do the right thing as a node in a cluster; we've not had any requests for that before. Probably the best bet is to give the trialware a shot, and if there are any specific issues we can take a look at them.
The only thing I can think of that might give trouble for a non-clustered Itanium might be the larger page size on that processor; the WOW64 emulation is otherwise pretty good, but it doesn't try and hide the difference in page size on the host processor in the emulated x86 system.
The two servers are SQL Servers and they are nodes of a cluster. We want make an image because we are going to update to SQL Server 2005. For this act, we would make the image manually, but we could use another server winth the console server and use it for make the images if it is better
Ah, I see. This definitely isn't something that we've looked at before, and neither Itanium nor clustered systems count as supported platforms for the console client, although we do intend for the Ghost.exe component to be usable in manufacturing Itanium systems.
As for clustering, Ghost would be suited to provisioning new nodes for joining a cluster, and it could be used on an individual cluster node to take a copy of the local storage - including local quorum, if that's applicable - but imaging shared storage with it would be tricker.
The biggest issue with GSS and clusters would be that we would effectively down the node to image the storage, since we have not been given the opportunity to make Ghost work with shadow-copied volumes (and working with VSS shadow copies on shared volumes would seem to be the ideal way to image those as well). I just don't have enough experience with clusters to know whether the process you'd have to go through with Ghost manually is going to be suitable for achieving your goals.
It's certainly an interesting question - I can see the attraction in having a recovery strategy during the migration to a new edition of SQL Server. I don't think I can really give you any sensible advice as to how to use Ghost in this kind of process until I've done some background work and spent some time discussing this with my colleagues here.
We've looked anothers alternatives. We were looking system recovery 7.0, but don't support itanium and I think
that we'll use a full backup with backup exec and reinstall if there was a problem, but this recovery strategy it's more slow and expensive than use an image of ghost or snapshot of system recovery that recovery a server in few minutes. I'll hope to see the new versions :smileytongue:
Comments
Hmm. We have a couple of early-model Itanium1's here which we used to help with some performance problems with the x86 emulation on the processor (for DOS Ghost, since it was used for manufacturing) but I don't think it's a platform we've done any specific compatibility testing for with the GSS console and client pieces, and I actually don't think we've done specific compatibility testing with the clustered edition of Server 2003 either.
Out of curiosity, what role are you wanting to use GSS in with your cluster; console client, console server, or manually ghosting? I'm not super-confident that the client code will do the right thing as a node in a cluster; we've not had any requests for that before. Probably the best bet is to give the trialware a shot, and if there are any specific issues we can take a look at them.
The only thing I can think of that might give trouble for a non-clustered Itanium might be the larger page size on that processor; the WOW64 emulation is otherwise pretty good, but it doesn't try and hide the difference in page size on the host processor in the emulated x86 system.
Ah, I see. This definitely isn't something that we've looked at before, and neither Itanium nor clustered systems count as supported platforms for the console client, although we do intend for the Ghost.exe component to be usable in manufacturing Itanium systems.
As for clustering, Ghost would be suited to provisioning new nodes for joining a cluster, and it could be used on an individual cluster node to take a copy of the local storage - including local quorum, if that's applicable - but imaging shared storage with it would be tricker.
The biggest issue with GSS and clusters would be that we would effectively down the node to image the storage, since we have not been given the opportunity to make Ghost work with shadow-copied volumes (and working with VSS shadow copies on shared volumes would seem to be the ideal way to image those as well). I just don't have enough experience with clusters to know whether the process you'd have to go through with Ghost manually is going to be suitable for achieving your goals.
It's certainly an interesting question - I can see the attraction in having a recovery strategy during the migration to a new edition of SQL Server. I don't think I can really give you any sensible advice as to how to use Ghost in this kind of process until I've done some background work and spent some time discussing this with my colleagues here.
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