I am the DBA and need to have a software install on one of the nodes in a 2 nodes active/active WSFC Win 2012 failover cluster . with SQL on top of the clusters. There is node 1 with SQL cluster 1 running on it as preferred node, and node 2 with SQL cluster 2 running on it as preferred node. Each of the 2 nodes contain C and D drives (vmdk). In addition each node have the cluster drives which are all RDM disks (SQL data drives, log drives, quorum).
All I need to do is get a VM snapshot of node 1 since we need to install a software on its C drive (not RDM). I know that hot snapshot for a VM with RDM disk cannot be done.
However, for steps I consider doing a cold snapshot like below:
failover cluster resource from node 1 to node 2, now on node 1 remain just the C drive (OS) and D drive (application) and node 1 do not have any more RDM disks, all RDMs are on node 2.
Shutdown node 1 and cold snapshot.
Start node 1 and run software install. if software install successful then fail back cluster on node 1 and done change request.
if software install unsuccessful then shutdown node 1 , restore cold snapshot back to node 1 then restart and fail back cluster1 back to it.
I realize that only a few of the community might have run into this scenario since this is mostly a VMWare question, wondering if any of you can share a similar scenario.
I contacted our VMWare support resource who told me that in order to get a snapshot, we need to disconnect all RDM from node 1 first, then take snapshot. But since I propose to take cold snapshot as per steps 1-4 then all RDM disks failover to node 2 , and no RDM remain on node 1 where we need to take cold snapshot
I appreciate your help.
Thank you.