Hello my fellow readers!

I want to bring to your attention one small thing which will likely save you time and relieve from lots of headaches when installing SQL Server on the cluster. I am talking about special characters like & < > " etc in cluster resource and group names. Sometimes it is tempting to name cluster resource groups for SQL Server under name of the application which SQL Server will be hosting. Say, application is Microsoft Office Communication Server (MS OCS) then you are likely to call this resource group OCS. If you intend to host multiple applications on SQL Server cluster (say OCS and Sharepoint) you may choose use & as a separator for a cluster resource name to reflect application names eg OCS & Sharepoint. Though it may seem as a good idea, you may not to do so as stated on MSDN:

"When naming a cluster group for your failover cluster installation, you must not use any of the following characters in the cluster group name:

• Less than operator (<)
  
• Greater than operator (>)
  
• Double quote (")
  
• Single quote (')
  
• Ampersand (&)
  

Also verify that existing cluster group names do not contain unsupported characters."

So, before you proceed installing SQL Server on the cluster, please go ahead and check for special and unsupported characters in names of cluster resources and groups. It well might be that these groups and resources were created by somebody else for you because at times people who are configuring Windows clustering and SQL Server failover cluster are different and not aware of this issue.

And of course, you should all read MSDN or SQL Server Books Online for things to do before installing SQL failover clustering