Error to install SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2012

Olá Amigos…

Decidi escrever este post em inglês devido as origens dos acessos que estou recebendo em meu blog, você poderá ver este artigo em português no MCDBABrasil.com

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Hello Friends…

This week I faced an interesting error… My PFE friend Alex Rosa (blog) helped me to fix this problem and I’m sharing this problem / solution because it might help you.

The environment and Goal

A Windows 2012 R2 on cluster with 2 nodes and my goal was to setup a SQL Server 2008 in cluster.

The problem

Firstly, I must say that since Jul/14 SQL 2K8 is no longer supported, SQL2K8 is in Extended Support.

When SQL Server 2008 was released there wasn’t Windows 2012, so SQL Server was made based on Windows 2k8, I’m not saying that SQL 2k8 is not supported on Windows 2012, SQL is supported on Windows 2012. but some functionality were made based on Win2K8.

During the installation of SQL2K8 on Win12 on the first node I faced this error message:

I do have my Cluster on online status and working well and I ran the cluster validation successfully, but during the SQL setup I faced a message error saying that my setup couldn’t check my cluster service, bellow we have part of the detail of the Report Setup Validation:

InstallFailoverClusterGlobalRules: SQL Server 2008 Setup configuration checks for rules group ‘InstallFailoverClusterGlobalRules’
	SQLNODE1	Cluster_IsOnline	Verifies that the cluster service is online.	Failed	The SQL Server failover cluster services is not online, or the cluster cannot be accessed from one of its nodes. To continue, determine why the cluster is not online and rerun Setup. Do not rerun the rule because the rule cannot detect a cluster environment.
	SQLNODE1	Cluster_SharedDiskFacet	Checks whether the cluster on a computer has at least one shared disk available.	Failed	The cluster on this computer does not have a shared disk available. To continue, at least one shared disk must be available.
	SQLNODE1	Cluster_VerifyForErrors	Checks if the cluster has been verified and if there are any errors or failures reported in the verification report.	Failed	The cluster either has not been verified or there are errors or failures in the verification report. Refer to KB953748 or SQL Server Books Online for more information.

I also tried running the setup from the command line using the SKIP_RULES:

Setup /SkipRules=Cluster_VerifyForErrors /Action=InstallFailoverCluster

And I got the same error…

Looking at the detail of the first error, the message says that the SQL couldn’t verify the cluster service, the cluster was online but setup couldn’t access my cluster.

I did some research on the web and I found this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2012/04/06/10291601.aspx

The author (Rob-MSFT) gave me a clue:

… These are deprecated features (Failover Cluster Command Interface (cluster.exe) and Failover Cluster Automation Server) in Windows Server 2012 but are made available, as there are still some applications that may need them, SQL Server being one of them.  Installing it may be necessary for any legacy scripts you have built on the old Cluster.exe command line interface. …

During the SQL Server 2008 installations the setup tries to check cluster service using a deprecated feature!

Checking my cluster installations using the articles from Rob I have this:

Get-WindowsFeature RSAT-Cluster*

 These is the features installed by default when we install the Cluster Feature.

The Solution

We just need to enable the Failover Cluster Automation Server, to achieve this you just need to run the PowerShell command bellow.

Install-WindowsFeature -Name RSAT-Clustering-AutomationServer

After these steps we’ll have success on our setup:

PS: You need to run these steps on all Cluster nodes.

Regards….