Setting up a reboot cycle for Active/Passive Cluster SQL Server

January 13, 2005

Most organizations have a system of weekly reboots or monthly reboots etc., for all their servers. When it comes to clustered servers, the reboot cycle would be little different. Usually the active node in the cluster will always be active, unless there is a failover initiated manually or when there is a hardware failure etc.

In this article, I am going to explain how to reboot cluster nodes.

We are going to discuss how to reboot the active nodes every Saturday at 1 AM. In addition, we will discuss how to make the current active node a passive node every week so that the same physical server will not be the active node every week.

Let's assume we have a Cluster server VCLUSTER with nodes SQLNode1 and SQLNode2. Let's also assume that the virtual server name for the SQL Server cluster is SQLClusterA. Refer Fig 1.0

We are going to take advantage of the command SHUTDOWN, the MS-DOS command FOR and the Windows Scheduler to handle the reboot of the cluster nodes. This will make SQLNode2 the active node and SQLNode1 the passive node on the first week and make SQLNode1 the active node and SQLNode2 the passive node the following week and so on.

Step 1

Create Folder C:\reboot as shown in Fig 1.1.

Step 2

Create file C:\reboot\Clusternodes.txt as shown below in Fig 1.2.

Make sure your active node is listed first and the passive node is listed second, separated by a comma.

SQLNode1,SQLNode2

Step 3

Create C:\reboot\preparereboot.bat as shown below in Fig 1.3.

REM Objective: Prepare rebooting of cluster nodes
REM Created By: MAK
REM Created date: Jan 10, 2004

for /f "tokens=1,2,3 delims=,"
  %%i in (C:\reboot\clusternodes.txt) do c:\reboot\rebootserver.bat %%i %%j

Download preparereboot.bat_

Step 4

Create C:\reboot\rebootserver.bat as shown in Fig 1.4.

REM Objective: To reboot the active node of the cluster every week
REM Created by: MAK
REM COntact: mak_999@yahoo.com
REM Created Date: Jan 10, 2004
shutdown /m \\%1 /r /f /c "Weekly reboot cycle for %1" /t 60
Echo %2,%1 > c:\reboot\clusternodes.txt

Download rebootserver.bat_.

Step 5

Create a Windows schedule to execute C:\reboot\preparereboot.bat as shown below.

a. Open Control panel. Refer to Fig 1.4.

b. Select prepareboot.bat as the program to schedule. Refer to Fig 1.5.

c. Select Weekly Schedule. Refer to Fig 1.6.

d. Change time to 1 AM. Refer to Fig 1.7.

e. Update using the Admin userid and password, which has access to the physical nodes SQLNode1 and SQLNode2 of the VCLuster. Fig 1.8.

f. Click Finish. Refer to Fig 1.9.