We are looking to set up a failover cluster for our SQL 2008R2 database. To accomplish this, we have 2 servers, both equipped with Fusion I/O cards that will both have identical copies of our production databases on them.
From everything I've read, we're supposed to set the servers up so they are both pulling the databases from a shared file storage of some sort. We intended to have both servers simply run the databases from their respective Fusion I/O cards rather than from a file share.
Clustering seems to be the correct choice for a high availability SQL setup, given the "LooksAlive" and "isAlive" checks it makes, but if the shared storage is a requirement, we may need to consider an alternative solution.
Given that we only really need the HeartBeat network functionality and don't need any shared storage, can we still use a Failover Cluster for SQL?