This is a question I get asked a lot by customers (last week being the latest) and the answer really depends on which platform you are running on. There is a support policy in Books Online that states that we only support a maximum of 10 mirrored databases per instance on 32-bit systems , however in...

I was working recently with a customer who was looking to deploy a SQL Server 2005 cluster across 2 geographically dispersed sites using Windows Server 2008. They were looking to utilise the new clustering improvements in Windows Server 2008 to build a highly available SQL Server solution. The customer...

The host node in the failover cluster performs a "looks alive" check every 5 seconds. An IsAlive check is performed every 60 seconds using SELECT @@SERVERNAME. If this fails the IsAlive retries 5 times and then attempts to reconnect to the instance of SQL. If all fail, then the SQL Server resource fails...