How to connect to clustered SQL 2008 R2 named instance?

  • Hi,

    Per our developers' request I just installed SQL 2008 R2 Named instance on a newly built cluster (Win 2008 R2). To connect to this clustered named instance I can use SQL_NW_NAME\INSTANCE_NAME,1433 string or just SQL_NW_NAME,1433.

    Now I learned from developers that their application (installed on 100s of workstations!) connects via ODBC using string "CURRENTSERVER" which in DNS points to the current SQL server IP.

    To switch to the new clustered named instance developers hoped that DNS can be changed to the new connection string, but system engineer says that DNS can point to IP only and there is no way to specify a port number.

    Can anybody please suggest a possible solution for setting configuration to be able to connect using just a DNS name without port number (cluster environment).

    Thank you in advance.

  • DNS is just a port.

    You can set up aliases on workstations with ports, or you could do port redirection with a firewall.

    Do you have a default instance on the cluster? If not, just move the named instance to 1433.

    If the clients can still connect to the instance name, then you can use the DNS name with the instance to connect. This should allow them to resolve the port with the server host.

  • Thank you Steve for trying to help me. This is a Named SQL instance configured with port 1433 which sits on 2 node cluster. And we don't want to touch users' workstations because there are few hundred of them. Each workstation uses ODBC connection that points to the current production standalone server. When we do final migration we just want the current ODBC string to point to the new Named Instance on the cluster. So what are my options?

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