April 4, 2012 at 1:17 pm
Hello,
I'm an Oracle DBA with RAC experience and new to SQL server and clustering.
I want to verify that our SQL Server 2005 SP2 clustering is working but all I seem to google is to unplug the active node and see if the second node becomes active. Obviously, I can't do this in production.
The second thing I do find on the topic is to check the configuration settings on each node or look in Cluster Manager and verify the settings.
I guess I am wondering if there is a more tangible test to verify if it's still working. For example, in Oracle, I can connect to the separate nodes and query to make sure the new record is visible in both nodes. Also, because Oracle is Active/Active, i can keep creating sessions and take a look at which instance/node I get routed to.
For checking the settings, In Oracle there is a crsctl stat res -t command that will display a very comprehensive list of rac/node info, telling me what services are turned on, what databases are up, etc for each node in the cluster. In SQL Server Cluster Manager, it does not have as much detail.
Thank you for any help you can provide!
April 4, 2012 at 1:20 pm
SQL Server clustering is not RAC. Only one node of a cluster can access the database. If you want to be sure that the failover works, you have to do a failover and see if everything works. This is something you could test during a maintenacne period.
April 4, 2012 at 1:44 pm
saly1 (4/4/2012)
I want to verify that our SQL Server 2005 SP2...
Any particular reason you're running SP2? It's been out of support for a while now so you should be working on upgrading it to SP4. Or SQL 2008 R2 or 2012 if it's an option. The fact that Microsoft may not provide SQL support if you need to contact them is something you should take into consideration. If you have a vendor restriction that's something I understand all too well. We have an app that doesn't officially support SQL 2005 SP4 and that app is more likely break than SQL so the decision has been made to migrate it off a shared cluster to allow upgrading for the sake of the other applications.
April 4, 2012 at 3:41 pm
thanks for the heads up on the support lifecycle. I'm new to the shop so I'm inheriting every database and I don't know the answer to your question about why we use what yet.
April 4, 2012 at 7:00 pm
No problem. As a side note, there's a lot of good scripts on this site and things in the forums to help sort things out. And if you can't find the answer just post and someone will help out.
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