posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 9:29 AM by marathonsqlguy

SQL 2005 Failover Cluster Upgrade Fun

When I learned to fly (airplanes) one of the rules drilled into us was to make use of ALL available information before heading out to the plane. With this in mind, I went to Books Online when I was ready to upgrade our production servers, which are set up using Microsoft Cluster Services. Based on the information I found there I felt I was ready to start the upgrade.

Now, we don't use clusters in our development or QA environments because they're not mission critical, but I would have been much better off if we did.

Imagine my surprise when, during the upgrade, while I've got our production databases offline, when a dialog page pops up asking me for the Domain Groups for Clustered Services. What? I'll let you use the link to read up on the details, but during an installation it certainly caught me by surprise.

I clicked on Help, and the Setup Help document popped up. Within that document are all the things I should have done before starting the upgrade. What bothers me is that the document is only available while Setup is running. (Try this yourself - run SQL Server 2005 Setup and click on the Help button. When the Setup Help guide is open, cancel Setup. The Setup Help guide will close itself!) I abandoned the upgrade until I fully understood the information I need to provide during the upgrade, and am in the process of getting a test cluster server set up so I can make sure I don't run into any more surprises.

I guess I didn't learn that lesson about "all available information" as well as I'd thought, but it'd really be nice if the Setup Help guide was available BEFORE I run setup.

Allen White - Marathon SQL Guy
Sr. Database Administrator

Comments

# re: SQL 2005 Failover Cluster Upgrade Fun @ Friday, April 21, 2006 5:20 PM

Hello Allen,

Are you looked at in D:\Servers\Setup\help\1033? There is a help setup here.

Nilton Pinheiro

# re: SQL 2005 Failover Cluster Upgrade Fun @ Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:23 PM

Thanks. I've got the info I need now from Setup help, but my point was that mention of this Very Important Step in the process should have been made in the Books Online, or that the Setup help should be much more readily available.

Allen

marathonsqlguy

# re: SQL 2005 Failover Cluster Upgrade Fun @ Thursday, May 04, 2006 10:57 AM

Hi Allen,

I am planning to upgrade our production server to SQL 2005, it's a cluster server too.

Could you please give me some advice and helpful links to avoid pulling all my hair out?

Thanks

Bill

Bill

# re: SQL 2005 Failover Cluster Upgrade Fun @ Tuesday, May 16, 2006 3:06 PM

The best thing is to build a cluster in a test environment and practice there. It helped my find the little holes in my upgrade plan. Shy of that, however, is to run setup, then open up Setup Help, and read all the steps involved in performing the upgrade. Once I got through the Domain Groups I was fine. (I still have a few problems hanging, like having to run SQL Server using a privileged account, and I can't run Surface Area COnfiguration against my clustered servers. As soon as those are resolved I'll post again.)

Good luck with your upgrade (and sorry for the delay in responding - my production upgrades have kept me VERY busy!).

Allen

Allen