How to setup maintenance plan on failover cluster

Question

We have configured a 2 node SQL Server Failover cluster on SQL Server 2008 R2 recently. I am curious to know whether

maintenance plans are supported on failover cluster or not? Maintenance plans are cluster aware?

If we create some maintenance plan on failover cluster, how the cluster handle these plans during automatic failover?

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Hi!

Maintenance Plans are of course supported. Technically they are nothing more than SQL Agent jobs which are stored in MSDB. In a clustered environment the Agent will always be running on the active instance, and so will MSDB. So for the maintenance plans there is nothing special to consider.

Answer 2

Hello CuriousDBA,

You don't have to worry about maintenance plan been on failover cluster.

Maintenance plan are handled on clustered instance the same way as on standalone instances. Maintenance plan are handled by SQL Server Agent service & msdb database, so when failover happens to other node then SQL Server Agent Service resource also moves other node & maintenance plans/jobs runs from that node.

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Answer 3

Hi there,

to clear your doubt you need to know the activity behind scene. FCI (Failover cluster instance) is a single point of failure, means the shared disk simply fails to the other node.

If you create a Maintenance plan on one node that information is stored in MSDB of that instance. The disk that hold this information is in sync with the disk  that is available to other node. when failover happens this information is available to the instance on other node.

i hope you get my point.cheers

kumar