Failover Clusters provide seamless Availability and Uptime. On failover clusters, we can run different services/applications. In general, we can run Hyper V VMs, VM Replicas, DHCP and also Database applications. A typical failover cluster consists of 2 nodes (servers), shared network and shared storage systems.
Today, we will be looking at the exact steps in order to create a failover cluster and how to run MS SQL server on the configured cluster.
There are some Prerequisites as mentioned below
Active Directory infrastrcture
AD administrator account
A shared storage system (iSCSI, FCoE or FC supported protocols)
2 or more nodes (Servers)
MS SQL server ISO
Functional DNS server
Few free IP addresses
Lets look at my setup
Server Name
dc.chatz.local
node1.chatz.local
node2.chatz.local
Server IP
192.168.79.129
192.168.79.130
192.168.79.131
Installed Roles
Active Directory / File Server (iSCSI) / DNS
Failover Cluster Manager
Failover Cluster Manager
Notes
iSCSI shares
512 MB – Witness
20 GB – Cluster Shared Volume
192.168.11.100 (for cluster heartbeat)
192.168.11.101 (for cluster heartbeat)
This process consists of 2 phases, Phase 01 would be the Cluster Creation and Phase 02 is the MS SQL DB Cluster setup.
Phase 01 – Windows Failover Cluster setup
NOTE: When working with the AD services, make sure to create an OU and place all the cluster related objects in the OU which you create. As per my setup, the OU looks like this
As the very first step, you need to install Failover Cluster role on all the participating nodes (in this example, we have only 2). Once you are done with the role installation, apply the Windows patches. And then you may finalize setting up the iSCSI shares. Finally, make sure to add all those nodes to the Active Directory Domain.
Then, you need to add those iSCSI storage as volumes on the selected nodes. This can be done using the Disk Management console.
Once you are done with assigning the volumes, you are good to validate the cluster. You can simply access the Failover Cluster Manager role from a selected node
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