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 SP install on 2008r2 SQL Cluster Taking Many Hours

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DataHammer
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2012-11-16 : 14:53:55
I work for a SaaS company located near Albany NY. We have an environment that tends to pose lots of management challenges: Multi-node Win/Sql2008r2 EE clusters, 20+ instances each, and thousands of databases.

The challenge we are currently facing is rolling out SQL 2008r2 SP2 and CU1 to our production data centers. We've found the installer has a serious scalability flaw; it runs a Remote Discovery process (RunDiscoveryAction) once for enumeration before installation starts, then again for every sql instance. Each Remote Discovery takes 2.5 minutes, which may not sound too bad until you do the math:

((DiscoveryTime * number of Hosts) * (number of intance +1) ) * Number of Patches = Discovery Time

for us: ((2.5*5)*(22+1))*2 = 575 minutes of discovery time.

We've tested this in our lab (Win/SQL 2008r2 EE 4-node cluster with 20 instances) and found the math is correct. I've tried everything I can think of to avoid Discovery events with no luck.

Has anyone found a workaround for this?

tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2012-11-16 : 15:25:33
This is the type of thing that needs to be discussed with Microsoft.

And this is exactly why I have a policy of no more than 2 or 3 node clusters with maximum of 4 instances on them. Been there, done that. Never again. Well I'll do it in SQL Server 2012 but not on prior versions.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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