Top Issues for Microsoft Support for Windows 2008 Failover Clusters
So, now that we are well into the release for Windows 2008, I thought I'd take a minute to go over some of the top issues we've seen on our end.
1. Hyper-V rollup fix – A rollup fix was released to allow for multiple highly available VM's (and their *.vhd files) to be placed on a single 'Physical Disk' resource. The fix for this issue is available for download directly from within the KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951308.
2. Storage hardware does not support SCSI 3 Persistent reservations – All of these issues are confirmed by running the Cluster Validation tests. Most scenarios involved adding disks to an established cluster without running validation test and having problems getting the disks added successfully. Many hardware vendors have settings in BIOS, firmware updates available to support SCSI 3 Persistent reservations. More information about this can be found at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771259.aspx#PersistentReservation and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947710.
3. Multi-Site configuration education – In 2008, multi-site configurations allow the cluster nodes to be on different subnets to reduce the need for configuring VLANs. Here are some related links:
4. Network name and file share witness resources fail to come online if disjoint namespace – Many of these cases come in 'File Share Witness' or 'Network Name' resource failures and often require confirmation that the cluster is running a disjoint namespace*. The fix for this issue is available for download directly from within the KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952247.
* Note: A configuration in which the DNS suffix of the node's FQDN differs from the domain name is also known as a "disjointed namespace configuration."
5. Validation fails with a Duplicate IP address error when Teredo Tunneling interface is configured – Teredo Tunneling is incompatible with Cluster Validation so Teredo, an IPv6 Tunneling Protocol, must be disabled for validation to complete successfully. More details on this issue and steps to resolve it are located at: http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2008/07/26/8773796.aspx
6. Validation fails with an incompatible OS version - The Failover validation test fails with an error “The operating system SKU is not compatible”. This happens on the non-Hyper-V product versions of Windows 2008 and is resolved by applying the hotfix available at 950179. The fix for this issue is available for download directly from within the KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950179.
Jeff Hughes
Senior Support Escalation Engineer
Microsoft Enterprise Platforms Support
