Hello all. I think it is appropriate that my first technical blog post be about clustering. I was doing some testing and setups for both my book and some upcoming webcasts, and for the first time in quite awhile, I tried to install a SQL Server 2005 failover clustering instance on a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster. When you start Setup, you will see this message:

First, one thing you have to know is that when you configure a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster, all of the storage goes into a pool (which is really a resource group) called Available Storage. With Windows Server 2003, each disk went into its own resource group. If you don’t take that into account, when you run SQL Server 2005’s Setup and get to the Cluster Group Selection dialog, here is what you see:

At this point, click Cancel to get out of SQL Server 2005’s Setup. You won’t be able to proceed unless you want to use Available Storage which I do not recommend.

To solve this problem, perform the following steps:
1. Make sure first that you are logged in as the cluster administration account.
2. Open a command window. It can be found under the Start menu. Right click, and select Run as Administrator.

3. In a command window, create the resource group with the command cluster <CLUSTERNAME> group <groupname> /CREATE.
4. Bring the group online with the command cluster <CLUSTERNAME> group <groupname> /ONLINE.

5. To see a list of resources in the Windows Server 2008 failover cluster, use the command cluster <CLUSTERNAME> resource.
6. Move the disk you want to use from the Available Storage group to the group you created in Step 3 with the command cluster <CLUSTERNAME> resource “<Resource Name>” /MOVE:”<Resource Group>”.

7. If you want to verify visually, you should see something similar to the screenshot below from Failover Cluster Manager.

8. Re-run Setup. When you get to the Cluster Group Selection dialog, the new group with with its storage will be available.