We had a raid failure yesterday on a server that was hosting databases and IIS.
We're trying to determine the best way forward in terms of our IIS and MSSQL hosting environment.
We'd like redundancy on the IIS side and the SQL side.
For some of our applications we're using pfSense to load balance two web servers (sticky sessions don't work well so we've gone to session state in the database). These two web servers hit a single MSSQL instance running SQL Express (free, our databases are very small, the largest is 1GB).
I feel reasonably confident in our IIS load balancing as when we run patches, it "just works" and I don't really have to do much.
However, our SQL Server infrastructure has me worried.
What's the best way to build a fault tolerant sql stack?
Edit: now that I think about it, a cluster would not necessarily have solved our issue. We had two drives fail in a RAID5. One 100% failed, the other not yet dead, but marked for failure with bad sectors. We had one database that was in the bad clusters that we had to restore from a backup. A cluster would have either broken or put the bad data throughout the cluster. Argh!