Am new to cluster env. We have a change for windows patching where they are patching servers which we have configured for SQL cluster. I have done patching for servers on which mirroring has setup. In that we have manually failover the setup and applied the patch..
Comming to cluster, as it have auto failover. Is it ok to apply patch with doing manual failover. If so on which node do we need to apply patch 1st. Active or passive??
or
Do we need to failover services manually before applying patch. On which node do we need to apply patch 1st.
Windows and SQL Server patching are done in the same manner - patch the non-active node first, fail over - then patch the other node(s).
To insure consistency and a clean fail over - use Powershell to manually move each cluster resource to the new host. This insures that you control how and when the cluster group itself is moved. This is especially important if your cluster is configured with a disk quorum - as allowing that resource to fail over automatically could cause the cluster to shutdown (depends on actual quorum votes and number of nodes - but the disk quorum is hosted on a single node so when you restart that node you lose 2 votes until the resources have been moved).