After you’ve reviewed the screen shown in Figure 4, click Next to go to the Ready to Upgrade screen, which shows the standard summary of what will be installed. After you’ve reviewed this screen, click Upgrade to begin the upgrade process. Depending on the speed of your computer, the size of your full-text database, the upgrade option selected (if full text is installed on your server), and the number of features you have installed, this process can take quite a while to complete.
Once the installation on this node is complete, you’ll be presented with a screen that shows each service and the status of the installation for that service. Click Next to go to a screen that shows that SQL01A has completed the upgrade process, as shown in Web Figure 2.
After you’ve reviewed this screen, click Next, and then Close to complete the wizard.
Upgrading the Second Node
When you launch the installer on the second node, the first thing it will do is install .NET hotfixes, which it also installed on the first node you upgraded. After installing these hotfixes, the SQL Server cluster will fail over, moving the databases into the SQL Server 2008 instance, which then upgrades the databases to the SQL Server 2008 version. Once the cluster has failed over to the upgraded node, there’s no way to fail the database back, so it’s important that you only trigger this failover when you’re ready.
Once the node has finished rebooting, you can relaunch the SQL Server installer. All the options that you select on this node of the cluster should be the same options that you selected on the first node of the cluster. As you move through the process, you’ll get back to the Cluster Upgrade Report, which shows that the SQL01A node of the cluster is upgraded and that the SQL10B node is pending upgrade, as shown in Web Figure 3.
Once the upgrade process has completed, you’ll be shown the final Cluster Upgrade Report, which is shown in Figure 5.
This screen shows that both nodes of the cluster have been upgraded. At this point, you can install the service pack and hotfixes that you need to install on the cluster, and then your cluster is ready to be tested and released to production.
Minimal Downtime
Although the cluster upgrade process is quite long, the total downtime to upgrade a SQL Server 2005 cluster to SQL Server 2008 is only a few seconds, letting you maintain your service level agreements while upgrading to SQL Server 2008 to give your application access to its new features.