Windows server 2019 failover cluster validation issue

Question

We are using Windows Server 2019 Failover Cluster for SQL AlwaysOn. There is no shared disks in the cluster.
The failover cluster validation takes long time to finish but it seems to be related to the software update validation.

Our servers does not have access to Internet but they are able to resolve DNS name.

Is that possible in this case that the software update validation step during the failover cluster creation could takes longer time that is supposed to ?

I can see in network traces i've took on the cluster nodes that they try to reach several MSFT sites and because my server does not have access to Internet, it takes a while to complete the failover cluster validation. As you can see in the next image, the server is not able to connect to Internet but the validation process try to reach update.microsoft.com (and many other MSFT web sites).

Is there a way to reduce the number of retry if Internet is not available ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi,

If i add the following registry key, the validation is a lot faster
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DoNotConnectToWindowsUpdateInternetLocations /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Thanks for sharing the information with us.

But my question is if we add this configuration on our server and the validation pass. Does the cluster is still supported?

As far as I'm concerned, the registry key won't affect the cluster creation. The cluster is still supported. While if we add the registry key, it's recommended to update the cluster nodes manually.

Thanks for your time!
Best Regards,
Anne

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Answer 2

Hi,

Is that possible in this case that the software update validation step during the failover cluster creation could takes longer time that is supposed to ?

If we run Cluster validation before creating the cluster, when creating the cluster, we may skip the validation, so that we may not worry about the validation takes a long time in cluster creation.

Is there a way to reduce the number of retry if Internet is not available ?

As far as I know, we may not have a method to increase the time to run validation. As a workaround, we may uncheck the update settings in cluster validation.

Thanks for your time!
Best Regards,
Anne

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Answer 3

Thanks for the answer.

It's weird that this is only happening with the Windows 2019 Core edition. I've done a test with the same Windows updates parameters with a 2-nodes cluster (Windows 2019 Core Edition) and a 2-nodes cluster (Windows 2019 Full Desktop experience)

The Windows 2019 Full desktop experience takes about 1 to 2 min to complete the validation steps
The Windows 2019 Core takes more than 12 min to complete the validation steps.

If i add the following registry key, the validation is a lot faster
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DoNotConnectToWindowsUpdateInternetLocations /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

But my question is if we add this configuration on our server and the validation pass. Does the cluster is still supported ?

Thanks!