Pausing nodes in a Failover cluster

  • Hi 

    We have an environment where we have a 2 node Availability group, where the primary replica is a fail over cluster instance and the secondary replica is a stand alone instance.

    We want to schedule a planned outage where we don't want to shut down SQL services but just want to pause the nodes (with no drain roles) and also don't want to fail over to the secondary replica.

    What are our best options or the appropriate way to perform such thing ?

  • generally this configuration would require 3 nodes, supply more detail on the FCI please

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • Hello,

    I would think you have two options.

    1.  I would think you could the failover mode to manual.  Of course, this makes you have to fail over the availability groups manually.

    2.  The second option would be if the availability group instances are sychronous, then the availability groups could be failed back immediately after your node test.

    A couple of things though.

    1.  Will SQL Server be processing transactions during your test?
    2.  Are you taking both nodes down or just one at a time? 

    Things will work out.  Get back up, change some parameters and recode.

  • We wanted SQL server don't process transactions, but at the same time didn't want to shut SQL services down, because that would flush the plan cache.

    and the initial requirement was just to pause the nodes without failing roles / draining roles.

    so that even on the primary replica which is FCI, there shouldn't be any failover to other node which could allow SQL be online on other node. We wanted to test the impact to the business if one of the core servers is not available.

    What we ended up doing was just disable the all the login (SQL authenticated and windows) on the SQL instance.

  • WebTechie - Thursday, July 13, 2017 3:04 PM


    1.  I would think you could the failover mode to manual.  Of course, this makes you have to fail over the availability groups manually.

    Manual is the only failover mode allowable when an FCI is a replica in an Availability Group

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply