Issues faced when upgrading an MSCS cluster server

Category: Installing & upgrading
Date: 28 May 2009
Product: SQL Backup
Versions: 5

When upgrading a Microsoft Cluster server from version 4 of SQL Backup to version 5 of SQL Backup, SQL Backup may fail to work properly or the upgrade attempt may fail.

SQL Backup version 4 did not recognize clustered SQL Servers, so there is no "standard" upgrade procedure to upgrade a cluster running SQL Backup version 4 to SQL Backup version 5, the latter having a cluster-aware installer. This reveals a few issues to pay close attention to.

To upgrade SQL Backup on a cluster, you cannot use the"install/upgrade server components" option in the SQL Backup console. In order to install or upgrade a cluster, the SQBServerSetup.exe server components installer needs to be copied to one of the node computers in the cluster and run locally on that machine using a domain Windows security account that has administrative access to all nodes on the cluster. You would normally find a suitable user to log in as by looking in the cluster's "Cluster Administrators" group.

Once the software has been installed, you will need to ensure that a resource has been created for the SQL Backup Agent Service. You can do this by opening the Cluster Administrator console and clicking the resource group that contains the resources for the clustered SQL Server. In this group, there should be a 'SQLBackupAgent' generic service resource. If this is not present, SQL Backup will not replicate the server settings to all nodes in the cluster so that backups can continue uninterrupted in the event of a failover.

By default, SQL Backup's server components installer does not create a SQL Backup Agent service resource when upgrading, because it assumes that one is already present.

The easy solution to this problem is to uninstall version 4 and install version 5 afresh as described above.

The other alternative is to create a generic resource manually for the SQL Backup Agent Service using the following steps:

  · Open Cluster Administrator from the Administrative Tools group
  · Right-click the group that contains the resources for your SQL Server
  · Choose New, then Resource
  · Name the resource SQL Backup Agent - <Instance Name>
  · Change the resource type to Generic Service
  · Choose all of the nodes that SQL Server can own (default)
  · Add dependencies on the SQL Server and the SQL Agent services
  · Enter the service name. For the default instance, it will simply be SQLBackupAgent and for named instances it will be SQLBackupAgent_<Instance Name> (The separator is an underscore)
  · Add the following registry keys to be replicated:
    · 32-bit servers:
      · Software\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>
      · Software\Red Gate\SQL Backup\InstalledInstances\<instance name>\ServiceLogin
    · 64-bit servers:
      · Software\Wow6432Node\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>
      · Software\Wow6432Node\Red Gate\SQL Backup\InstalledInstances\<instance name>\ServiceLogin
  · Finish