Multi Instance FCI Question

High Availability
1

Hi people,

One of our clients wants to deploy a virtualized FCI, with 8 cores licensed, Std with LSA (MSSQL 2016).

They would like to have a 2-node cluster, active - passive but they would like to have 2 instances in this cluster.

Is it possible to ensure that if an automatic failover occurs for any reason, both instances failover at the same time, in any scenario????

The point is to take advantage of LSA and leave the passive node without being licensed. Do you know any way to deploy a multi instance FCI without having to license the second node???

Regards

2

I can't think of a good way to make two instances fail over together. Maybe have a job that runs every few minutes somewhere and checks the state? If they don't match it moves the other one? That's risky though.

In an AG you could do it all in TSQL so it would be easier. Run a job for the other AG and if it's on a different node, fail it over.

Neither solution is great. There will be fail-overs when you don't want them.