Failover Clustering in SQL 2005
Posted by decipherinfosys on January 18, 2007
Installing SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 in a Clustered Environment – Things to Look Out For
Recently applied Service Pack 1 to a clustered 64-bit SQL Server 2005 Enterprise environment, and discovered a couple of issues for which there is no official documentation readily available. Both of these issues are easy to address, but if one is unaware of their existence it can lead to a rather problematic and time-consuming upgrade.
Issue 1: SQL Browser Service
Make sure to manually stop the SQL Browser service. The SP1 installation does not stop this process during the upgrade, and setup will present an error that it cannot continue because sqlbrowser.exe is still active.
Issue 2: Do Not Use SQL Server Authentication
In a clustered environment, where neither server in the SQL cluster physically possesses the hard drives containing the SQL data (they are obviously located on the shared SAN), you must use Windows authentication rather than SQL Server authentication to perform the SP1 upgrade. This issue is not readily apparent. SP1 setup will allow you to proceed after specifying SQL Server authentication and sa password, and will continue through the upgrade process. The only indication that SP1 is not applying properly is a “Failure” status will appear for the Database Services product in the Installation Progress window. If you experience this during your SP1 upgrade, simply cancel out of the setup process and restart it.
Additional Item of Note – Installing Over Remote Desktop Connections:
During the initial installation and configuration of the SQL Server 2005 cluster the following error was encountered:
“Setup failed to start on the remote machine. Check the task scheduler event log on the remote machine”.
The task scheduler event log did not provide any helpful details. The installation was being run on the first node in the cluster over a Remote Desktop session. However, there was also Remote Desktop Connection session active on the second node during that time. This is a show-stopper for the installation – you cannot have any Remote Desktop Sessions active on any of the other nodes in the SQL Cluster. In the event this occurs, you must cancel the installation, end the Remote Desktop Connection, and re-initialize the installation.
Best resource for SQL 2005 clustering:
This is the best resource available for failover clustering in SQL Server 2005 – an excellent whitepaper by Microsoft:
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