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What’s wrong with this picture?
By Devin Heitmueller | April 11, 2008
You are about to deploy SQL Server 2000 into “Group 0″ of the following cluster. Can you spot what is wrong with this cluster and why your install is going fail?
If you actually tried to deploy an instance on this cluster, you would start filling out the wizard and, after picking the nodes to deploy on, the CPU will go to 100% and the installer will hang indefinitely. Because it happens when you click “Next” after picking the nodes in the cluster, you might be tempted to think the problem had something to do with the node selection. In fact, the problem occurs because the installer is trying to build the display for the next dialog box which shows you the clustered disks to choose from.
The key to this problem is a footnote in the Microsoft knowledge base article KB293788:
This problem can also occur if the resource name for an available shared disk or the resource group name for the available shared disk has the name as the disk itself. If drive X: has a resource name of X:, or its resource group name is X:, the same symptoms will occur.
In SQL Server 2000, there is a bug that occurs if you make the name of the disk resource the same as the drive letter. Whereas a physical disk resource named “Disk G:” is valid, making the resource name “G:” will result in the installer hanging once you click “ok” on the “Failover Clustering” page in the installation wizard.
The problem is compounded by the fact that it can be **any** physical disk resource in the cluster and not just the one you are intending to deploy onto. So a manual procedure would require a user to go to the cluster administrator and look at every disk resource in every resource group in the cluster. This is fairly simple in your test environment that might have a cluster with one resource group, but a time consuming operation to make a DBA perform on a cluster with many resource groups every time he wants to deploy a new SQL Server 2000 instance.
— The Clarity Advantage —
GridApp Clarity has a precheck built-in to automatically check for physical disk resources that have names that cause the issue, and to show you an error message informing you of the problem before the install starts. This allows you to correct the problem (presumably by renaming the offending disk resource) rather than running the installer and having to figure out why it pins the CPU at 100% indefinitely.
Topics: SQL Server 2000