Troy Ault

Automation one day at a time!

2 minute read

10/20/2017 3:16:29 PM

Following up from my last post I have published the Failover Cluster Instance composite configurations and updated the previous configurations. Initially lets talk about the updates to the which were pushed.

Single Instance, Primary AlwaysOn, and Secondary AlwaysOn all had additional optional parameters added enabling all configurable items to be leveraged. Each of these are defaulted so no breaking changes to the previous examples but additional flexibility added.

Lets move on to Failover Cluster Instance as this has been one I have gotten several questions on how to leverage. Utilizing the SQLCompositeResources module there are three new resources which will be utilized to build a Failover Cluster Instance FailOverClusterDisk, FailOverClusterInstanceFirstNode, and FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode. To show how they can be leveraged we will walk through the example provided for FailOverClusterInstanceFirstNode and FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode

Failover Cluster Instance First Node

First resource we will cover this time is FailOverClusterInstanceFirstNode_Example.ps1. As in the previous post Credential Management and LCM Config are identical so I will not cover these again.

Metadata ($CofigData)

Here we need to provide a few more data elements than we did previously. Unlike our previous builds we have to provide an installation path for our SQL Server database and logs files as these are required to reside on a shared disk. Since at least one shared disk is required we need to provide the disk layout and how each drive should be labeled. To simplify we do this by providing a key of DiskConfiguration and passing an array of hashtable values. Each hashtable will provide the parameters FailOverClusterDisk requires. Finally we need to provide a name for our FCI and the IPaddress.

SQL Server Configuration

The main section is the SQL Configuration and its a simple call. One call to FailOverClusterInstanceFirstNode will ensure the following:

Ensure Failover Cluster feature is installed on the machine Ensures disks partitions are created, formatted and added to the cluster. This is accomplished by calling FailOverClusterDisk Ensure .Net framework is present Installs Failover Cluster Instance of SQL Server Configures SQL FCI To complete the example Resources are moved and the configuration is generated and deployed.

Failover Cluster Instance Additional Node

Next we will look at FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode_Example.ps1

Metadata ($CofigData)

Since we are adding to an existing cluster, we have a much smaller set required. All required values are listed in FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode_Example.ps1 .

SQL Server Configuration

The main section for SQL Configuration is again simple, a singe call to FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode. Calling FailOverClusterInstanceAdditionalNode will do the following:

Ensure Failover Cluster feature is installed on the machine Wait for the cluster created from FailOverClusterInstanceFirstNode to be found Join the cluster Ensure .Net framework is present Add node to SQL FCI To complete the example Resources are moved and the configuration is generated and deployed.

With the addition of these composite resources I hope building out new SQL configurations will be simpler and have less redundancy. Please let me know if you have issues or recommendations for improvement.

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