I finally got response from Microsoft, it appears there is an issue with MSI and Cluster services; he didn’t make it clear to me if it was Windows 2008 issue or not.
This is what they found as the issue to be:
This particular issue is a case sensitivity issue for system name.The workaround
is to rename the system names to upper cases only. If the computer name is in
lower case or mixed case, setup fails to notice that its on owning/active node
and needs to run the scripts. The reason why this happens is that MSI gets the
computer name from local system to compare it with the name of current owner
from cluster service. The name MSI gets is all upper case. The name that cluster
API returns is actual name of the machine which could be mixed or lower case.
SQL Server setup uses case sensitive comparison here which makes it impossible
for setup to realize when it is running on active node. Thus setup does’t run
the scripts which it is supposed to.
So after this email I got another email explaining what to do to fix it:
- Un-Install SQL Server From the Cluster ( Make sure you remove all the components of SQL server ) and clean up all the folders .
- Rename both node names to the Existing Name with Upper Case ( This will ask for a system Reboot ).
- Evict One Node at a Time and then Add it back to the cluster ( Make sure you don’t have to type the node names but just select it from the list and it’s in Upper Case).
- Start the installation from the node which is owning the SQL Server Group.
- Upgrade SQL Server 2005 to Service Pack 2.
So we are trying to do that right now but keep running into other issues. Update with if this worked or not in future :).
———————– Update Oct 3, 2008
So finished reinstalling the Cluster; and I don’t get the issue that was listed below. I asked when will the next patch be out to deal with this issue; the Microsoft Support engineer was not sure and couldn’t give me a time line.
At least we have a work around now :D.
SQL Canada (SQLCAN) 