The long and winding road (AKA Installing a Windows 2008 R2 SQL Cluster) - Intro

As a few of you may have already discovered, installing a SQL cluster, even in a lab environment, even with little or no security added to it, is no small feat. Googling information is a painful and steep process, if you are pretty new to clusters like I was when I wrote this guide. You may find bits of information here and there, but to understand the full picture and putting it all together is hard.

I spent more or less one week trying to understand how to install a SQL cluster before succeeding and decided to write a fully illustrated guide on how to do it to setup a lab where you can experiment.

I have to add a disclaimer as well:
The configuration described in this guide is not fit for running some mission-critical app in a production environment, it is to be used to create a small personal lab to experiment with clustering. Such clusters should be created by certified professionals, since if there is one thing that writing this guide taught me is that clusters are hard to create, to maintain and there is plenty of things that can go wrong.
Having said that, I'm not responsible for any problem, damage, loss of data this configuration might cause. You have been warned, now have fun experimenting.


The guide is a big one, I had to split it in several posts. Here is a description of the single parts of it.

Part 1

where you will find the list of what you need, a description of what we are going to do, requirements for virtual machines, the ip addressing plan and instructions on how to install a domain controller

Part 2

where you will learn how to install Freenas and how to configure it to create the disk space, shared among cluster members, that will host your clustered db

Part 3

where you will connect the shared disk to the cluster members through iSCSI, install your cluster and learn about the last things to do before actually installing SQL server

Part 4

where you will create a one-node SQL cluster

Part 5

where you will add an additional SQL node to your SQL cluster. Voila'.