Windows 2008 and the IsAlive Sanity Check - Brian Kern's Exchange Blog. Admins running Exchange Clusters are likely already familiar with volume mount points, but I'll provide a brief overview for those new to the topic: A mount point is a location on a disk that looks and acts like a folder (in a logical sense) but actually points to a physical disk logical unit number (in a physical sense). Most cluster administrators use mount points to overcome limitations on the number of drive letters that can be assigned in a multi-node cluster. Some admins choose to use them just for convenience as it results in simplified paths to your databases and logs while still allowing you to divide the dbs and logs across many separate disk LUNs. (Our Exchange Team blog mentions mount points explicitly when discussing storage configurations - see Mount points are still around in Windows 2008, but if you're thinking of implementing them for Exchange, I recommend reading the following KB article first: Scenario.
Troubleshooting Cluster Logs 101 - Why did the resources failover to the other node? - Ask the Core Team. The most popular question everyone asks themselves before calling Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) for assistance in determining a Root Cause Analysis be done. Why did the resources failover to the other node?
Some times a Root Cause Analysis for a Failover Cluster can be very time consuming, especially if it's a Windows 2003 (8) node Failover Cluster. Even though the references listed below may state they are for Windows 2000 Advanced Servers Cluster Service (MSCS), the same references can be used in the analysis of a Windows 2003 Failover Cluster. Here's how we begin with the Root Cause Analysis: Some customers may be asked by Microsoft CSS Support Professional to gather either a Cluster MPS Report, SQL MPS Report and/or Exchange MPS Report which will be determined by whatever role the Cluster may be used for whether it be SQL, Exchange, File/Print, etc, etc.
Thanks and remember, doing RCA is very tedious. A physical disk resource may not come online on a cluster node. On a cluster node that is running Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2, a physical disk resource may enter the Failed state when you try to move a group that contains the physical disk resource. If you restart the cluster node that has the physical disk resource that did not come online, the problem is temporarily resolved.
When this problem occurs, the following entries are logged in the Windows Server 2003 Cluster log for the physical disk resource that entered the failed state: 000020cc.000014d0::2010/01/23-19:40:39.929 ERR Physical Disk <Disk Q:>:DiskspCheckPath: GetFileAttrs(Q:) returned status of 87.000020cc.000014d0::2010/01/23-19:40:39.929 WARN Physical Disk <Disk Q:>:DiskspCheckDriveLetter: Checking drive name (Q:) returns 87 Additionally, the following events are logged in the Windows Server 2003 System Event log: Similarly, on a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster nodes you may see following entries are logged in the Cluster log: SQL Server 2008 installation fails if the Setup account does not have certain user rights. Consider the following scenario. To tighten security, you remove some default user rights to the local administrators group on a Windows operating system. In preparation for setting up Microsoft SQL Server on this system, you add the Setup account to the local administrators group.
In this scenario, if you either install or upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server, the installation process may fail, and you receive various error messages as noted in the following sections. Scenario 1: For a new installation, the Setup program fails, and you receive the following error message: Access is denied Additionally, you may notice error messages that resemble the following in the Detail.txt file 2009-01-02 13:00:17 SQLEngine: --SqlServerServiceSCM: Waiting for nt event 'Global\sqlserverRecComplete$NIIT' to be created 2009-01-02 13:00:20 SQLEngine: --SqlServerServiceSCM: Waiting for nt event 'Global\sqlserverRecComplete$NIIT' or sql process handle to be signaled 2009-01-02 13:00:20 Slp: Access is denied.
SQL Server 2008 and R2 Cluster Best Practices - Pankaj Mittal [MSFT] I have been working with several of my customers recently helping them install and/or review a new SQL Server 2008/R2 cluster environment on Windows Server 2008/R2 for best practices and gotchas. The Cluster Validation wizard in Windows Server 2008/R2 checks for many clustering best practices and reports them as warnings in the cluster validation report. Therefore, the first thing I do to look for best practices is to review the cluster validation report. In addition to that, I usually look for the following additional best practices on a SQL Server failover cluster - Before starting SQL Server installation 1. It is required to configure the MSDTC as a clustered resource on a Windows 2003 Failover cluster to be able to install SQL Server 2000/2005. In Windows Server 2003, you could only have one MSDTC clustered resource, which could cause Isolation and Performance issues. 2. 3.
It’s no secret that the I/O system is very important to ensure good SQL Server performance. 4. 5. 6. 1. 1. 2. Changing the SQL Port of a Clustered SQL Server 2008 in Win Server 2008R2. SQL Server clients may change protocols when the client computers try to connect to an instance of SQL Server. Client computers that have Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) version 2.6, or later, can try multiple protocols or Interprocess Communication (IPC) mechanisms to establish connections to SQL Server. An enhancement has been made to the client side network library, Dbnetlib.dll for MDAC version 2.6, and later. With MDAC version 2.6, and later, if multiple protocols are available, and a connection attempt with the first protocol fails, the client application immediately tries to use one of the other protocols.
By default, clients have TCP and Named Pipes as available protocols. You can manipulate the protocol ordering by using the SQL Server Client utility. The client application uses the protocols in the order specified on the client computer. The protocol order is stored at the following registry key location under the value ProtocolOrder: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SuperSocketNetLib HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\SNI9.0. How to configure SQL Server to listen on a specific port. This article describes static and dynamic port allocation in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2005, or SQL Server 2000 . It also discusses how to configure an instance of SQL Server to use either a static port or a dynamic port. If you configure an instance of SQL Server to use a static port, and you restart the instance of SQL Server, the instance of SQL Server listens only on the specified static port.
The SQL Server clients must send all the requests only to the static port on which the instance of SQL Server is listening. However, if an instance of SQL Server is configured to listen on a static port, and another program that is running on the computer is already using the specified static port when SQL Server is started, SQL Server does not listen on the specified static port. By default, the default instance of SQL Server listens for requests from SQL Server clients on static port 1433.
. ( ) ( ) SQL 2008 R2 Named instance and static port. Hi Don, Please follow below steps to configure your named instance to listen on specific port For Standalone instance of the SQL server change the dynamic port of the named instance to the static port by using SQL server configuration manager in SQL 2005/2008. In order to change the port we need to go to the SQL server configuration manager. Start->Program Files-> Microsoft sql server 2005->Configuration Tools-> SQL server configuration manager.
In configuration manager console, on the left hand panel, expand the SQL server Network Configuration. Click on the IP Addresses tab on the top and keep the “Dynamic ports” row BLANK and write the desired port no. on which you want the named instance to listen on “TCP ports” row in the “IP ALL “section. After performing these activities we need to restart the SQL server services for the changes to take affects. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\<Instance Name> \MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib\Tcp Hope this may help. How to create the cluster.log in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering - Clustering and High-Availability.
Windows Server Failover Clustering logs information about cluster activities including normal operations like updates between nodes as well as errors and warnings related to problems that occurred on the cluster in a text file called cluster.log. The information in the cluster.log is very valuable when trying to troubleshoot just about any problem encountered with a cluster. Having been in Microsoft’s support team that helps customers resolve Failover Cluster problems, I can tell you that having this detailed logging makes the difference of being able to identify the cause of a problem at the first occurrence, instead of having to configure logging after the fact and wait for the problem to happen again.
As valuable as it is, there is room for improvement for the Windows Server 2003 cluster.log. The text-based file format means using a text editor/viewer to parse the log, which is not ideal when dealing with very large logs. Here are some cool new commands that can make this even easier: