Clustrering vs Mirroring for SP2010

[sqlguy7777]

Howdy,

There seems to be some confusion about Sharepoint 2010 and whether the MS best practice is mirroring or clutsering.

However, we have found doent really address our question of the pros and cons of the issue. It seems to be a sticky question.

What are your thoughts on this please?

To me mirroring seems less sensible for Sharepoint as I have found its rare to lose a database, you'd be more likely to lose a whole SQL instance ( I'm a DBA by the way ). Mirroring also requires all the witness server setup etc etc.

Also, while setting up a cluster is more messy, once its running ( as long as people dont mess with it ) its usually just fine.

I find the mirroring only makes sense if you must not have ANY downtime at all, but, that said, you could use say VMWare Fault Tolerance if things got really critical, and achieve roughly the same result.

We are looking at running SQL 2008 R2 on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise on VMWare 4. We have some seriously grunty new boxes ( fully specced Dell R910s with 256 GB of RAM etc ) so perfomance wont be an issue.

All thoughts welcome. Hopefully you can cut through the "noise" on this topic for me.

cheers

Steve

[saron]

SharePoint 2010 is a collaboration tool which connects & empowers people through its integrated set of rich features.
But does this statement really reflect its real capabilities!!!
To be closer we can say SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners, and customers to work together in new and effective ways.