Remove a node from a cluster

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Remove a node from a cluster

Green Armchair

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September 27, 2011 at 6:57 am

#390483

Hi

I need to remove nodes from several 2008 R2 failover clusters. This is to prevent production and non-production instances sharing the same node.

I have 4 nodes to be removed from 6 instances. I'm using the Maintenance section of the installer.

Unfortunately, it appears that after each uninstall, the node needs a reboot before the next uninstall is allowed to proceed.

Can anybody confirm that this is the case, or even better, a way that doesn't require a reboot? I can't be rebooting nodes that are currently running production instances.

Thanks

Andy

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Derrick Smith SSChampion Points: 10833 More actions · Answer 1

Instead of uninstalling the instance, you could use the failover cluster configuration manager and set each instance to only use specific nodes. This would give you flexibility in the future also in case you need to shuffle things around without reinstalling/readding nodes.

But to answer your original question, yes it will usually require a reboot of the OS, and no, I don't know of any ways to bypass that.

Elliott Whitlow SSC Guru Points: 102296 More actions · Answer 2

I like Derrick's answer, you get what you need, separation, while still maintaining the ability to reshuffle as needed.

I only want to point out this is not the preferred nodes setting on the General tab at the cluster resource level, but on the Advanced Policies tab of the SQL Server itself within the resource group. At that point you can tell SQL that there are nodes it might be installed on but it is not allowed to run on and it won't.. I would also set the preferred nodes..

CEWII