Testing failover

Question

I am brand new to MS Failover clustering.   I have created from the checklists that microsoft provides a 2-node failover cluster with Windows 2008 in my test lab.   I setup SQL Server as the application.   When I did a failover
test, all the services and applications and disk drives and network came up as "online" or "up".   Sounds like it worked But does this mean that all the process for failover have completed?  The reason i ask is because I
need to down the nodes for our SQL DBAs to work on the SQL instance.   I am told this will cause another failover.   So, I wonder if there is a time lag that I need to consider before downing the servers.
Cal Miyatake

Answer 1

I am brand new to MS Failover clustering.   I have created from the checklists that microsoft provides a 2-node failover cluster with Windows 2008 in my test lab.   I setup SQL Server as the application.   When I did
a failover test, all the services and applications and disk drives and network came up as "online" or "up".   Sounds like it worked But does this mean that all the process for failover have completed?  The reason i ask is because I need to down
the nodes for our SQL DBAs to work on the SQL instance.   I am told this will cause another failover.   So, I wonder if there is a time lag that I need to consider before downing the servers.
Cal Miyatake
You're doing wrong thing. Generic Windows cluster is by far the best thing to keep SQL Server up & running. You really need to use SQL Server own built-in clustering features (some of them being built on top of a MS cluster either way but that's another
story). It's DBA job to configure one. For more details see:
High Availability Solutions (SQL Server)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190202.aspx
Overview of AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877884.aspx
An
overview of High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions available for SQL Server
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_pfe_blog/archive/2013/06/15/an-overview-of-ha-dr-solutions-available-for-sql-server.aspx
This is the best place to ask your SQL Server HA & DR questions:
SQL Server HA and DR group
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/home?forum=sqldisasterrecovery
Hope this helped :)
StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.