SQL SERVER – Error in Validation: Listener in Workgroup – Unable to determine if the computer exists in the domain ‘WORKGROUP’

There are many deployments where I have assisted my clients in creating Always On Availability Groups. Sometimes they come to me with special requirements, based on their infrastructure, and I always learn from them. In this situation, my client was trying to create a listener in a workgroup, and it was failing with error: Unable to determine if the computer ‘ListenerName’ exists in the domain ‘WORKGROUP’

THE SITUATION

My client has created two nodes Always On availability group in the cluster. This whole setup was in Azure infrastructure. Since they were testing, to save the cost they have deployed only 2 nodes availability group. Since they can’t afford 3^rd machine, they planned to deploy a domain-less cluster. They followed blogs on the internet, and it was deployed fine. They were also able to deploy availability group and databases synchronization was healthy.

The last step was to create a listener for this availability group. They were following this article

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/sql/virtual-machines-windows-portal-sql-availability-group-tutorial#configure-listener

One of the steps was to create Client Access Point for the listener and it was failing for them. Here is the screenshot of the error message.

WORKAROUND/SOLUTION

Instead of Cluster manager to create a listener, we need to use SSMS or T-SQL to create the listener. In the SSMS UI, we need to make sure that we are choosing “Static IP” and providing the IP Address as shown below.

Here is the T-SQL to achieve the same.

USE [master]
GO
ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [FIN-USW-AG]
ADD LISTENER N'FIN-USW-LIST' (
WITH IP
((N'10.0.1.22', N'255.255.255.0')
), PORT=1433);
GO

After creating a listener, they were able to follow the rest of the article and deploy Always On Availability Group in Workgroup in Azure Virtual Machines along with listener.

Have you seen such error earlier?

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)