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Reboot NLB w/ SQL Cluster

 If you'd like to take your load balanced services offline each node at a time in order to avoid any downtime, you'll need to use the following steps.

To stop or start handling Network Load Balancing cluster traffic by using the Windows interface
  1. To open NLB Manager, click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Network Load Balancing Manager. You can also open NLB Manager by typing Nlbmgr at a command prompt.
  2. If NLB Manager does not list the cluster, connect to the cluster.
  3. If you want to immediately stop cluster operations on all cluster hosts, right-click the cluster, point to Control Hosts, and then click Stop. If you want to immediately stop the cluster service on only a particular host, right-click the host, point to Control Host, and then click Stop.
  4. When you stop handling NLB cluster traffic, client connections that are already in progress are interrupted. To avoid interrupting active connections, consider using the drainstop cluster-control command (instead of the stop command), which allows the host to continue servicing active connections but disables all new traffic to that host. 
  5. You may want to manually initialte a failover of SQL services at this time. See the instructions below for further assistance.
  6. Once the drainstop has completed, you will be able to reboot the drainstopped host.
  7. After the drainstopped server has come back online, from the NLB Manager, right-click the drainstopped host, point to Control Host, and then click Start.
  8. Fail over the other SQL Server if necessary. 
  9. Drainstop the other host using the instructions performed in step 4. 
  10. Reboot the second host. 
  11. After the second drainstopped server has come back online, from the NLB Manager, right-click the drainstopped host, point to Control Host, and then click Start.
  12. Move the SQL services to your preferred node.


To Fail Over the SQL instances. 

  1. Connect to Failover Cluster Manager (Server Manager -> Features -> Failover Cluster Manager)
  2. Expand Services and Applications & select SQL Server service. You should  be able to see the current owner of the service. In my example below, node1 owns the service.

  3. 1_SQL_Server_Failover_Cluster_Initiating_Manual_Failover
  4. Right click the service and choose Move this service or application to another node, then select the node that will remain online as shown in the image…

    2_SQL_Server_Failover_Cluster_Initiating_Manual_Failover
  5. You will be prompted to confirm. Select to Move..

    3_SQL_Server_Failover_Cluster_Initiating_Manual_Failover
  6. Within a few seconds (of course, in real production environment the time factor may be different), you should see a failover to node 2, which can be verified as done previously.

    4_SQL_Server_Failover_Cluster_Initiating_Manual_Failover
  7. Repeat these steps in order to fail the node back over to the primary host before rebooting the secondary host.

Article ID: 1050, Created On: 5/1/2015, Modified: 5/1/2015