Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

20.5. Clustering Windows Server 2008

Before you can install SQL Server 2008 clustering, you must first install Windows Server 2008 failover cluster services. Once it is successfully installed and tested, then you can install SQL Server 2008 clustering. In this section, we take a high-level, step-by-step approach to installing and configuring Windows 2008 clustering.

20.5.1. Before Installing Windows 2008 Clustering

Before you install Windows 2008 clustering, you need to perform a series of important steps. This is especially important if you didn't build the cluster nodes, as you want to ensure everything is working correctly before you begin the actual cluster installation. Once they are complete, then you can install Windows 2008 clustering. Here are the steps you must take:

1. Ensure that all the nodes are working properly and are configured identically (hardware, software, and drivers).

2. Confirm that each node can see the data and quorum drives on the shared array or SAN. There are other quorum options but we'll start here for our installation. Try writing a file to the disk to ensure that the other nodes can see the file.

3. Verify that none of the nodes have been configured as a domain controller or that you have multiple domain controllers in your environment or any other critical services such as Exchange running on them.

4. Verify that all drives are NTFS and are not compressed.

5. Ensure that the public and private networks are properly installed and configured.

6. Ping each node in the ...