Clustering and SQLAgent Mail

[Adam]

I'm going to be setting up SQLAgent to automatically send notifications on failure. My question is are there any "gotcha's" I might need to no about when doing this in a clustered environment? If the server were to failover, does the agent peform as it should?

Thanks in advance!

[Jaganmohan Rao]

SQL Mail is not cluster aware as on today as per MS Technet and can'nt be failover. You may have to reconfigure in case of any node failure. Visir Technet for further info and work arounds.

[Jaganmohan Rao]

SQL Server 2000
SQL Mail establishes an extended MAPI connection with a mail host, while SQLAgentMail establishes an extended MAPI connection on its own. Both SQL Mail and SQLAgentMail can connect with Microsoft Exchange Server, or a Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) server.

NOTE: SQL Server 2000 requires a Microsoft Outlook 2000 client, or later, due to the limitation of only providing extended MAPI support.

Before you configure SQL Mail, you should test the mail profile used by the mail client to verify that you can use it to send and receive e-mail to and from the mail server.

WARNING: SQL Mail is not fully supportable when used on a SQL Server Failover Cluster due to the MAPI limitation of not being cluster-aware. If you use SQL Mail with clustering, support provided for SQL Mail is on a "best effort" basis with no guarantees of stability or availability.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in SQL Server 6.5, SQL Server 7.0, and SQL Server 2000 when used with failover clustering.