Additional Final Steps
Performing this upgrade has been a significant event, and before you put your SQL Server 2000 cluster back into production, you should perform the following:
- It is very important to test that the newly upgrade SQL Server cluster can failover properly. This means that you should test your cluster, failing it back and forth several times to see that everything is working properly. For more advice on how to test a cluster, see this article.
- Take a look at the Event Logs to see if there are any unexpected messages. If there are, then you need to resolve them now before you release the server to production.
- Update all of the statistics in each of your databases. The upgrade process causes the current statistics to become invalid, and if you don’t update them now, performance could be very slow when you release the server to production. Sure, the statistics will eventually update themselves, but his is a slow process. You will want to budget some time for this as part of your upgrade plan.
The upgrade is complete, and assuming it went smoothly, you should now be able to return to production.
On the other hand, if you experience problems with the upgrade, you have several options. I would first recommend that you call Microsoft Support (for their fee-service) and ask them for help. But if you cannot do this (for whatever reason), I suggest you don’t spend too much time using trial and error to resolve your problems, as most likely, it will be a waste of time. Sure, spend enough trouble-shooting time to look for obvious, fixable problems. But if the problems you experience are unusual and don’t seem obvious, then the best way to spend your time is to rebuild your cluster from scratch. I know you hate to hear this, but based on my personal experience, once you begin to get clustering problems, this is the only real solution, unless you have an inside connection to Microsoft support. But if you plan well, as I recommend, the odds of having a major problem are slim, and your upgrade should go well.
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