Network bind order warning during SQL Server installation at failover cluster

 

Installing SQL Server 2008, 2008R2 and 2012 on failover cluster has been significantly changed from SQL Server 2000 and 2005.
Installation is performed separately on each node in order to avoid failures and downtime and much more.

One of improvements is more "in-depth" pre-installation checks.
One of the commonly ignored checks is “Network binding order”.

Network bind order warning

It has been skipped for two reasons. First reason, it’s only warning. The second and more significant reason is because sometimes it is hard to fix it.

The straightforward way to handle this kind of error is to change the network order in network connections.
Follow the KB.

If the following KB won’t solve the issue, we can manually edit “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Linkage\Bind” based on the result of “wmic nicconfig get description, SettingID” command output and network connections control.
Remember that registry editing can be dangerous and prone to costly mistakes, so please backup your server's registry prior to the manual editing.

We can also use nvspbind utility instead.
It helps us query and modify the NIC and protocol order / usage.

No matter which way you chose to address this issue, the most important thing is not to skip installation warnings unless you are 100% sure you’ll fix it later before the server goes to production.