« Boring Jobs Dull the Mind (and Insight Failures) | Main | How do I know when to patch or to leave well enough alone? »
Deploying SQL Server 2000 onto Windows 2003 clusters with more than 4 nodes
By Devin Heitmueller | June 11, 2008
So you’re deploying a clustered instance of SQL Server 2000 onto two nodes in a Windows 2003 cluster. The installer runs to completion, but all of the resources in your newly created cluster group are in the offline state, and any attempt to bring the group online results in an unknown failure.
In many cases, this is the result of some unexpected behavior in Microsoft’s license enforcement. SQL Server 2000 documentation states that it supports instances of up to four nodes. However, if you are running Windows 2003, you can have Microsoft clusters up to eight nodes.
Where the documentation becomes unclear is that the limit is not on the number of nodes the instance is deployed on, but rather on the total number of nodes in the Microsoft cluster. So if you have an eight node Microsoft cluster, with the intention of putting four 2-node instances onto it, then you will hit the above failure condition.
It would have been nice if the SQL Server 2000 installer would just tell you this is the problem when you try the above scenario. Unfortunately, it just proceeds with the install and then the instance doesn’t startup. Here at GridApp, we didn’t realize what was causing the problem until we dug through the error logs and put the following string into Google.
[clushelp.cpp:150] : 259 (0×103): No more data is available
Only then do we arrive at the Microsoft Knowledge base article describing the issue (KB811054).
— The Clarity Advantage —
GridApp Clarity has a precheck built in to automatically check how many nodes are in your cluster if you are deploying SQL Server 2000, and to show you an error message informing you of the problem before the install starts. This allows you to correct the problem (such as picking a different cluster to use or making the cluster smaller) before you deploy a broken instance and spend the time trying to figure out why it won’t startup.
Topics: SQL Server 2000