I'm in a process of migrating my windows servers which contains SQL from windows 2012 to windows 2016. At the moment my Always On failover cluster contains 3 2012 servers and i want to replace 2 of them with new 2016 servers which i have already created.
The issue is that once I try to add the 2016 node the cluster goes offline right away and the "current host server" changes to the new server which is not configured yet at that point. When i'm removing and adding back an existing 2012 server this doesn't happen (host change or offline).
The logs didn't provide any special information and the only thing i could find is this (10.47.2.99 is the cluster IP of one of the 2012 nodes) :
Cluster resource 'IP Address 10.47.2.99' of type 'IP Address' in clustered role 'Cluster Group' failed.
Based on the failure policies for the resource and role, the cluster service may try to bring the resource online on this node or move the group to another node of the cluster and then restart it. Check the resource and group state using Failover Cluster Manager or the Get-ClusterResource Windows PowerShell cmdlet.
The Cluster service failed to bring clustered role 'Cluster Group' completely online or offline. One or more resources may be in a failed state. This may impact the availability of the clustered role.
Clustered role 'Cluster Group' has exceeded its failover threshold. It has exhausted the configured number of failover attempts within the failover period of time allotted to it and will be left in a failed state. No additional attempts will be made to bring the role online or fail it over to another node in the cluster. Please check the events associated with the failure. After the issues causing the failure are resolved the role can be brought online manually or the cluster may attempt to bring it online again after the restart delay period.
I have tried many different ways to attack this issue including removing existing config from the same subnet to make sure it doesn't try to drift to that IP and alert about IP already being in use. Another thought was maybe Quorum settings but that didn't work either.
From the looks of it I think the issue is some unknown 2016 server setting or service version which causes the host to be taken over and fail due to missing config or else I would expect it to be the same on my 2012 servers.
My end goal is to add the 2016 servers to the cluster and then configure their cluster IP as i would normally do.
Thanks for reading and any ideas you can provide.