Allen White

More Good Times with Clusters

I've been in Las Vegas most of the last week, and for the first time actually took more money from the tables than I put in. That was very cool!

After the troubles I had with the clustered server upgrades I decided to set up a test environment to make sure I had everything working perfectly before attempting the upgrade in production again.

My ace network guy, Dan, set up a test server with Windows 2003 SP1 and MS Cluster Services, and two groups, one for each virtual server I was going to set up. I keep a set of directories with my installation media for SQL Server so I don't have to enter the server room to load the CDs/DVDs. (I don't have access to the room, so it's much easier this way.) I've been using these directories without problems for most of three years now.

I started the installation but it kept failing, and removing the installation as it exited. Dan thought that setting up MSDTC as a separate group would solve the problem, but that wasn't it. Finally I scrolled through the info messages in the Application log and found that Win2003 SP1 was disabling the TCP/IP ports because of security concerns, and when cluster services attempted to contact the newly installed server on those ports it timed out, so the installation failed.

In all the installations of SQL Server I'd done I'd never run into a problem like this before, but this was the first attempt I'd made to install SQL Server 2000 directly onto a server running Windows 2003 SP1.

I found a SQL2000 distro more current than the original RTM, but before the release of SQL2005 and I copied the Developer's Edition files from the DVD to the c: drive of the physical cluster server. That did the trick, and I installed both virtual servers, then applied SQL2000 SP4 to both. Now I can test the upgrade in a clustered environment.

Allen White - Marathon SQL Guy
Sr. Database Administrator