Being a DBA is something akin to being a duck-billed platypus: people try to classify you, but you really end up fitting into multiple categories. A DBA ends up doing lots of different things: writing SQL scripts, setting up jobs, restoring backups, and even some server administration.
At work, we normally have the vendor set up things like SQL Server clusters and we manage them after they are set up and running. For reasons unknown to me at the time, we had a vendor try and fail 3 times to set up a SQL Server cluster for us. The job then fell on me. I was a little apprehensive at first because LUNs, SAN space, etc are foreign concepts to me, but I said I would give it a try. I got really lucky. In his previous position, our network engineer was a server guy and had installed a SQL Server cluster from scratch - so I had some great wisdom and input from him. I was able to Google a great deal of what to do and, of course, I had our network engineer in the cube in front of me. Honestly, everything went seamlessly until I would get to the end of installing the first instance. It failed over and over again and we could not figure out why.
This may be something of a perfect storm because it involves Active Directory and AD here at my workplace may run differently than AD at your workplace, but I learned several things in this process. One is that when we are creating a SQL Server cluster, the cluster itself is an object in AD. What we finally found out was happening was that our newly created SQL cluster object needed to create other objects in our domain to complete the install and configuration, but it did not have the rights to do so in AD. You can be logged in as Domain Admin all day long and it will not make a difference unless the cluster object that you have created has the appropriate level of rights in AD. This one bit me good (and several times!) so I am making sure that I make note of it and underline it =)
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