Query on cluster

Question

Hi All,

I have a Failover Cluster Manager setup with two nodes (let's say Server01 and Server02), both running Windows Server 2019. Both nodes are part of an Always On Availability SQL cluster. I want to remove Server02 from the Failover Cluster Manager.

Our database team has migrated all databases from Server02, but they have not uninstalled SQL. If I need to remove Server02 from the Failover Cluster Manager, will it be sufficient to right-click on Server02, select More Actions, and then choose Evict?

Answer 1

Hi Glenn Maxwell,

Thanks for your post. Yes, you can evict the node after you migrate all the resources to the another node. Here is the evict command. You can also try to evict from the UI as you mentioned.

Reference: Remove-ClusterNode (FailoverClusters) | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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Answer 2

Hello @Glenn Maxwell

Most important step you must follow before removing the node from Failover Cluster Manager is basically to remove the replica from the Availability Group in SQL Server Management Studio. After that you can remove it from the cluster  

Remove a Secondary Replica from an Availability Group (SQL Server)

Regards

Javier

Answer 3

NO. you cannot directly remove the node from the cluster as always on high availability cluster for SQL was created for two nodes.

As you have already migrated all the databases from SQL node 2. Ask the database administrator to remove the node from always on availability group( you can perform this task if you have administrator password- sysadmin user.)

• Remove Databases from availability databases from mentioned 2
• Remove Replica from mention 3
• remove Listener from mentioned 1

once you have removed the High Availability setting in SQL , than you can drop the cluster node to avoid SQL corruption on node 1.