MSDTC Failing In A Cluster

I’m merrily working away on installing SQL 2008R2 on a bunch of new clusters. The SQL installs have gone fine and I’m getting set to install MSDTC, one for each SQL instance (read the awesome post by Cindy Gross on this).

The install of MSDTC went smoothly and it seemed very happy. Then I failed over the cluster…

MSDTC failed.

It wouldn’t restart.

I failed back to the original node and it wouldn’t start there either.

What’s the error?

I dumped the last few minutes of the cluster log by opening a dos box command prompt and running…

cluster log /gen /span:5

This dumps the last five minutes of cluster logs into C:\Windows\Cluster\cluster.log

I scrolled through to get to the MSDTC error piece:

INFO  [RES] Physical Disk: Failed to get vol MP root for path \\?, status 123
ERR   [RHS] Error 123 from ResourceControl for resource <instance>_MSDTC.
WARN  [RCM] ResourceControl(STORAGE_IS_PATH_VALID) to <instance>_MSDTC returned 123.

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T-SQL Tuesday #19–What A Disaster

Allen Kinsel (blog|twitter) is running this months T-SQL Tuesday and wanted to know about preparing or recovering from a disaster. I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell a little story of how a disaster sucked up around three weeks of my life a couple of years ago.

It was a normal day, I was sitting and quietly going through a small staging release when my director asked me to come into his office. Instantly I started wondering “what did I do?”

Not being able to come up with anything egregious I settled down the stomach gurgles and went wandering in. That I walked in and was offered a seat I got nervous again, this was not a good sign with this director. Now I was really curious as to what could be up.

 

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Speakers Third Rule

You’ve mastered the first rule and have submitted a session to present at a SQLSaturday, local user group or at your office, excellent. Your presentation is written, all the details are there…slides, demos and you’ve got your patter. You’ve followed the second rule and the presentation is all you. What’s next?

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Speakers Second Rule

After writing a post for Un-SQL Friday on the first rule of speaking I decided that it would make quite a good series of posts, so here’s my second rule of speaking:

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Un-SQL Friday #004–Speakers First Rule

I may be a day late and a dollar short for Un-SQL Friday #004: Speaker Lessons Learned but still felt I had something to share.

One of my favorite book series is The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. The first of the 11 book series is called Wizards First Rule. It’s one of those oft rehashed tales of someone ordinary who turns out to be anything but. One of the things passed along was the first of a series of rules about magic. It made me think of speaking and the rules around that.

There are numerous rules (sure, you could call them guidelines or pieces of advice but we’re playing semantics here so go with it).

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