Forgive me if I'm not able to be totally clear here. It is not intentional, I'm a senior level developer in a very small company having to act like a manager at the moment.

Anyway, the story is that we have 2 older dell servers with SQL Server 2008 Standard in a "cluster". I put that in quotes because I'm still not 100% clear what that means. We have 2 brand new blade servers and want to move the existing databases to the new hardware.

Ok, so here is the gotcha. We need to do this with little or no down time. I'm being told that we can evict the passive node, then pull in one of the new servers. But I'm also being told that this is a dangerous step because something could go wrong that would cause the cluster to fail and then we would be left with nothing because the active server would not be able to come back up.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to handle this? I'm being told that the only way to ensure success is to have at least a day of down time where we bring up a new cluster on the new hardware and then migrate the databases 1 by 1.