Hello all,
We have two production cube servers(cube1 & cube2) to which users can access to any time from Excel. Each of these severs have only one instance of SQL Server Analysis Service(2008) installed on them. However, at any point the end user is connected to
only one of the servers, depending upon the availability .We do this by having our end users connect to an alias called 'cube' and we would route the 'cube' to either 'cube1' or 'cube2 'using DNS
commands.
For example if we would like users to be routed automatically to cube1we would do something like this:
dnscmd ws1 /recordadd abc.local cube CNAME cube1.abc.local
Similarly to cube2:
dnscmd ws1 /recordadd abc.local cube CNAME cube2.abc.local
This kind of setup worked out great for us for the first couple of months and provided us great flexibility but lately we have been noticing this annoying problem where users would have restart their Excel service in order to notice the DNS change. For example,
if users had their Excel reports pointing to cube1 and we change it to say connect to cube2, they would have toclose down Excel and relaunch it to see the change take place. If they don't then their report is still dangling over the old connection cube1.
The Excel restart was not required the first few months, but it is required every single time we make a DNS change now. I am trying to chase this problem and not sure where i should start.
Would definitely appreciate some feedback.
SS