“Rule Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) cluster verification errors” Failed

In one of my regular customers, they are begging the SQL Server 2012 Migration, at the installation process for a SQL Server 2012 Instance on a Windows Server 2008R2 Cluster, they found an error while adding a node to de SQL Instance.

 

This error didn’t allow them to go forward to add the node on the SQL Instance, there are a few posible causes to check.

  • First, check if there are failed test son the Cluster Validation Report. TO solve this problem execute the Cluster Validation Wizard and ensure there’s no failed test or with an error state (test with a warning state are not a problem)
  • The validation process may fail under various conditions. When this issue occurs, you must perform a manual validation to make sure that the hardware configuration is correct before you try any workaround that is mentioned in this article, https://support.microsoft.com/kb/953748
  • There’s another cause not so known, for SQL Server to make the cluster verification, it needs to locate the validation reports from all the nodes of the cluster using the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). SO you need to check that when you do a ping between the servers the IP it’s resolved to the FQDN, if is not the case check the DNS and host file.
  • Another cause can be the Windows Firewall blocking the validation, in case it’s active.

In this case we checked the first and second probable causes, but the error still appear.

 

After that we checked the third probable cause and we observed that the IP was been resolved to the NETBIOS name and not to the FQDN name, so we fix that problem, and we retried the add node process to the SQL Instance, this time was successful.