While installing a clustered SQL Server instance recently I ran across a bit of an annoyance. When I was going through the SQL Installation process I didn’t pay any attention to which node of the cluster currently owned all the disks that I was planning on using for SQL Server. Because of this when I got to the Data Directories screen none of the drives would validate. This was because all of the disks were owned by the other node of the cluster.
There’s a few different ways to solve this problem.
- Run the installer on the other node.
- Move the available storage to the node you want it on via the command line.
- Down the node which is hosting the storage.
Option 1 pretty much sucks as you are about 1/2 way through the installer by the time to figure out this is a problem, but it will work.
Option 2 is a great solution, but you can’t do it via the Failover Cluster Administrator in Windows 2008 R2. You have to use a command line tool called cluster.exe. The syntax is as follows:
cluster group “Available Storage” /move:{New Node Name}
Option 3 is the fastest. Just right click on the node in the Failover Cluster Administrator and select more options, then “Stop Cluster Service”. Everything will failover to another node. If you have a two node cluster this works fine, if you have a cluster with 3 or more nodes this probably won’t work very well.
Hopefully if you run into this annoying little issue, this will help you solve it.
Denny
