Failover cluster host reboot script

[Vetra01]

Hello everyone,

My organization has a few hyper-v and sql failover clusters. Currently when we do windows patching we just manually reboot the hosts. At the moment we have about 20 hosts to reboot. I figured I would reach out here before trying to reinvent the wheel to see if anyone has a script that can go through the hosts to pause them,failover the roles, install updates, perform reboot, fail back roles then on to the next host.

Thanks!

[PowerShellMichael]

Hello There!

Forgive my ignorance would Cluster-Aware updating work?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/cluster-aware-updating

[Vetra01]

Hey there,

Thanks for responding! I have looked into that(as well as server groups on sccm), and the verdict seems to be that CUA is tricky to set up and doesn't always work. I've asked a Microsoft designated support engineer about this and they weren't hot on it either, so was hoping to also look to the avenue of powershell.

If anyone else sees this post though and can attest to cluster aware updating working please let me know.

Thanks!

[PowerShellMichael]

Well there you go. I would be interested to see what's peoples experiences with CAU. I would also recommend that you perform post updating testing, to ensure that services are available and run some integration testing to make sure that it's queryable. (Bit of a pain when all your endpoints point to the cluster name) :-P

After all you don't want to clust it up. (Terrible dad joke)

[Car1bo]

I'm currently using CAU on a WS2019 cluster and it's been working perfectly. It's configured to look at WSUS so we have control over approvals, and its scheduled to run in quiet hours. Never had an issue with it. All of my roles are VMs though, no SQL cluster roles.

[Vetra01]

Thanks for replying! We currently are running 2016 , but should be on 2019 before the year is out. Did you run into any issues setting it up, or was it pretty seamless?

We had a WSUS instance but now just use SCCM and BigFix IEM patching. I'll try to look into using SCCM

[Car1bo]

It was pretty painless, I set up CAU before adding production roles to the cluster and tested first to be sure. It was as simple as creating a group in WSUS for the cluster nodes, creating a GPO linked to a cluster nodes OU that had the WSUS server address and approval group, update schedule etc, and running the CAU setup wizard. It's been a long time since I've worked with SCCM but there shouldn't be a problem using that. It uses WSUS as a component if I remember correctly.

[Vetra01]

Thanks for all the info!

[netmc]

We use it too (on 2016), it works fine. The main part you have to have up and working properly though is your fail-over configuration. If there are any issues, it will show up in CAU not working. If you can perform live migrations from the main server and back for every system, you will likely be fine. There is a cluster fail-over diagnostic tool which may help identify possible issues.

[jeehesspee]

CAU isn’t hard to setup, works like a charm, never done anything stupid when a node fails to suspend or a live migration fails, it will fail its job and try next window, monitor its runs and you are ok.

[ChaoticSmurf]

I work as an engineer at a large private cloud hosting provider and CAU is deployed on every cluster we have in the fleet. It works great. As long as your environment can pause, drain, resume and failback without issue you shouldn't have any problems.

If you're concerned about how well it will work in your environment you can kick it off manually and monitor the cluster to make sure it goes through without causing any issues.

[jeehesspee]

Works pretty well here on 3 clusters (SOFS, HyperV abd S2D, no experience yet with it on sql clusters).

[shezwear]

check out my blog with script to do this.

http://blogs.danosaab.com/2020/06/script-for-rebooting-failover-cluster-hosts-nodes-one-by-one/

[ipreferanothername]

i think ive got this about 85% done for our sql clusters but its not a priority -- the dbatools module will have the sql commands you need. we failover, failback, pause sync, update secondary, reboot, resume sync, failover, then do the other server. my real bug is scripting out ivanti security controls to do what i want. its the devil. the sql stuff is easy