Install another DB instance and add it to existing SQL Server 2005 instance to make a cluster?

Question

Hello,

I don't have much experience installing MS SQL Server in clustered modes, so please excuse me for any naivety on the question.
Well, what I'm trying to do is pretty straightforward.

I already have a MS SQL Server 2005 instance installed & running. I don't know what kind of setup was this.
However, I'm trying to install SQL Server 2005 on another machine and have this one talk to the above that is already running. I'm assuming that I can achieve clustering in this way.

Is this practical and achievable? Am I just thinking this to be too simple when it is not?

I can not do everything from scratch because the already running instance is very critical to our environment and we basically are looking at having the second one come in and these two act as a failover clustering environment.

Any thoughts or ideas or suggestions are requested.

Thank you,
Phani

Answer 1

No. Probably this cannot work.

To setup the SQL Server failover cluster, it has to meet certain hardware and software requrements. Let me simply put it this way,
In terms of hardware, you must have the shared disk that can be accessed by both servers where your SQL Servers are running.
In terms of software, you must install Windows cluster service first. And the Windows cluster service will validate the software and hardware can meet all failover cluster prerequisites and then you can go on and create the SQL Server failover cluster.

To double check if your current critical app is not the cluster first node, open a command line window and run "cluster.exe res" to see if there are any SQL Server instance already running as a failover cluster resource. Probably not I believe.