I’ve a fun week upcoming, I get to do a bunch of installs of SQL 2008 R2 on some Windows 2008 R2 clusters.

I’ve had a lot of experience in building and working with Windows 2003 clusters and deploying SQL 2008, this is a new era for me and means new toys to play with and new things to learn. I’m excited to really get to grips with Windows 2008 clustering, there are some significant differences between it and 2003 which is going to provide some challenges. I’m aiming to perform quite a few build up and tear downs of one cluster over the next couple of weeks to build up my levels of comfort with the newer technology, and work towards getting some nice scripts together to do so.

As a consequence of Windows 2008 R2 being new to me for clustering I decided to pick up Pro SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering by Allan Hirt (blog|twitter), a Clustering MVP and guru (who has a new whitepaper out about Applying Updates to a Clustered Instance of SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2). Allan was on the MidnightDBA web show a couple of weeks ago (go watch it) where there was lots of conversation on several aspects of High Availability.

I’m still only a quarter of the way through the book but have already found out some fantastic information on things such as the network priority and installing server roles from the command line.

As the build goes along I plan on putting up a couple of posts to track the process and gotchas as well as a final review of Allan’s book, so check back soon.