HI There
We had an existing 2 node active / active cluster, 1 running a default instance of Sql Server 2005 Enterprise Edition 9.0.3152 (SP2 + Hotfixes) and the other running a named instance of the same version.
We recently added 2 new nodes to the cluster, they were successfully added and we tested the cluster group failover successfuly to the new nodes.
Last night we tried to install Sql Server 2005 Enterprise edition on the new nodes.
I followed to proper proceudure of modifying the installation for both instances and selecting the 2 new nodes to apply them to. This went 100%. Sql Server 2005 successfully installed for both instances on the 2 new nodes, all log files were successful.
We then tried to apply SP2, we tried the following:
1. We ran SP2 from the active node, but when we go to the screen to select what you want to apply SP2 too we could not select anything, if you clicked on database engine the message said that these instances were already at a later version and we could not proceed. This is how i successfully applied SP2 to the original 2 node cluster but it does not work for additional nodes to an exisitng cluster.
This is also what all the documentation we could find said, refer to SP2 release notes under the topic "Failover Cluster Installation", it is also the method we found when googling.
2. We then tried what is described under SP2 release notes "Rebuild a SQL Server 2005 SP2 Failover Cluster Node".
We ran SP2 from the new nodes while they were passive, but when we got the screen where you select what to apply the SP2 too we could not select database engine the message at the bottom said that SP2 must be run from the active node and that we were attempting it from the passive node, this is what we tried in step 1 described above.
3. This was a last resort. We were advised to try failing over the instance to the new node and then running SP2. Personally i thought this was a bad idea, one should never fail over a instance of sql server to a node with incompatible binary versions and secondly when we installed sql server on the new nodes a warnng popped up before hand stating that the instances were at a later version and that the new nodes must be at this version before attempting fail over. I thought that sql would not even start, to my surprie we successfully failed over the sql group to the new node, when we ran SP2 it looked good we could select the database engine on the new node to apply SP2 too, BUT after clicking next after a few seconds the SP2 installation just closed, NO INFORMAITONAL MESSAGES NO ERRORS NO WARNINGS it just closed an never came back.
I had never seen this happen on a cluster before, needless to say this made me very nervous so we failed the sql group back to the original nodes and gave up.
PLEASE can some tell me how to apply SP2 to 2 new nodes in a 4 node cluster all methods descibed in SP2 release notes and other documentation as descibed above in step 1 and 2 do not work !
Thank You
