We have two servers. They are both HP DL 380 G6 servers with the same hardware and specs running Windows Server 2008. Currently the second server is a warm standby for the first with an automatic fail over cluster for SQL 2008 Enterprise.
I would prefer to have both servers running and serving requests. Therefore if our staff need heavy reports generated from the database they can use the secondary server without slowing down the web requests from our users. The idea would be to have a dfs style replication for the databases files to assure symmetrical databases in real or near real time on both servers. Only one server would be serving the web requests. There are no plans for a load balancer currently.
I am familiar with fail over clustering but this sort of simultaneous clustering has eluded me.
can someone shed some light on this? Maybe I am looking at this all wrong.
Thanks!
Addition: Thanks for the responses. I find it hard to belive with 25,000 dollar software you cannot scale out to multiple servers. How do large companies deal with ever growing requirements? No one machine can handle a large site like Facebook if they used MSSQL (which I'm sure they don't but its just an example)
ADDITION2: Still looking for a little more feedback if anyone would be so kind. Remember to look in the comments too.
Not going to work. Cluster and Mirroring are - in the MS world - always active/passive for SQL Server. You can add replication, but that will have to be on top (additional server).
To add to what others have said, SQL Server 2012 allows this with the use of "Always On Availability Groups". You define one node in a cluster as the primary upon which all write activity will occur. You can then use one or more secondary nodes to satisfy read-only queries.
An overview can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877884.aspx
Agree with TomTom - it's worth you knowing that Oracle's RAC system allows this, not cheap however...