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Hello everyone. Today’s post is going to cover the steps needed to follow should you ever have to remove a ‘Physical Disk’ resource from a clustered service or application where that disk is configured as a mount point. Removing a disk from a group may be needed if the application no...

On September 4th, Microsoft announced general availability of Windows Server 2012. In a global online launch event Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Server and Tools Business, announced the general availability of Windows Server 2012. In his keynote speech, Nadella described how Windows Server 2012...

Several months ago, I posted a blog on adding a new disk to an existing cluster. Another question we get asked a lot is “How do I replace a disk?” In this blog, I’ll walkthrough the process of replacing a 1GB disk with a 2GB disk. This process is similar to how you could go about doing a SAN migration...

One question I get asked a lot working with our customers is how to failover the ‘Cluster Group’ and ‘Available Storage’ groups? Under the covers, those two groups are still just groups like any other you’d see under ‘Services and Applications’ in Failover Cluster Manager. We just didn’t expose through...

With Failover Cluster and the quorum models used, the concept of votes is used to determine which subset of nodes survives should one group of nodes lose connectivity with another group of nodes in the same cluster. In this example, we’re using a ‘Node Majority’ quorum model and two sites separated by...

We wanted to do a quick write-up on an issue we’ve seen in rare circumstances with 2008 R2 clusters where a ‘Physical Disk’ resource may fail to come online with no events logged in the system event log. Issue They symptoms of this issue is that the disk will show in a ‘failed’ state in Failover Cluster...

Microsoft Learning hosted another new and exclusive Jump Start virtual training event – Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals .  We are thrilled to announce availability of the HD-quality video recordings – FREE – on TechNet Edge and soon coming to MS Showcase, the Zune Marketplace,...

Just one week after Microsoft Management Summit 2011 (MMS), Microsoft Learning will be hosting an exclusive three-day Jump Start class specially tailored for VMware and Microsoft virtualization technology pros.  Registration for “ Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals ” is open now and...

Hello everyone. With SP1 almost ready to be available to the general public, I thought I’d send out a quick e-mail with a couple issues we’re seen and their resolutions. Issue: RSAT tools will not install after installing SP1 Remediation: The new version of the RSAT tools will be released in April. We...

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 SP1 has shipped. Here’s the bottom line: Volume Licensed, MSDN and TechNet subscribers get access February 16 . All customers get access February 22 through Windows Update and direct download The Windows Server team has information on SP1 here: http://blogs.technet...

Every once in awhile, we reach out to the IT community to get an idea of what kinds of topics you’d like to see in our blog. AskCore covers a lot of stuff (setup, deployment, cluster, bitlocker, activation, Hyper-V, etc.) If there’s any content you think would be good material for us to put together...

One of the major changes from 2003 to 2008 is the way we handle logging of cluster debug events. I thought I’d do a quick write-up on how cluster debug logging works in 2008. In Windows 2003 Failover Clustering, the cluster service on each node constantly writes to a live debug output file. These files...

  I thought I’d post a quick blog on this topic since we run into cases where evicting a cluster node is used as a troubleshooting step. That being said, evicting a node should NEVER be a primary troubleshooting step. Evicting a node to try and resolve a cluster issue may get you deeper in the hole...

Windows 7 is only a few weeks away!  The buzz is building!  However, if your applications aren’t quite ready for Windows 7 (or even Vista) and having you’re having issues, then maybe you’re not quite as excited as I am.  But – there is good news - we may be able to help you out! Last Monday...

We’ve been seeing a lot of calls lately from customers who are running the validation that’s required prior to installing and configuring failover clustering, and the validation fails in the ‘Storage’ portion of the tests. The specific error seen in the validation report is: If you click on the ‘Validate...

The steps in many of our KB articles have been criticized in the past for being too difficult for ordinary users to follow.  As a result, missed or incorrectly implemented steps may have resulted in problems being exacerbated, or new problems being created.  Well, we were listening to the feedback...

In prior versions of Windows Server Cluster (NT, 2000, 2003), adding a new disk to an existing cluster was often a cumbersome process. Sometimes the OS would not recognize the new disk. Sometimes the Cluster would not be able to add a new disk resource. Sometimes it took a reboot of the OS to detect...

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...

On October 1, 2008 the Professional level “Enterprise Platforms Support” business at Microsoft will transition to a call-back model for all Professional support incidents in the United States and Canada.  Below is a description of how to contact Microsoft customer service, as well as...

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10. Improved maintenance mode for disk resources. Need to take a snapshot of a disk or run chkdsk? Now the cluster will allow you to keep the resource online but unavailable for client use. What this means? No more downtime or reboots to do disk maintenance. 9. No more cluster HCL. We got rid of it...

Here is a listing of the public content currently available on the Microsoft site for Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. Of particular note is the new troubleshooting information which contains a listing of common error messages you may run into and some recommended troubleshooting steps you can...

One of the most common issues with Windows Failover clustering deals with the storage attached to the cluster. This post is meant to give a very high-level overview to disk troubleshooting methodologies and how to narrow down the source of problems even before any logs or diagnostic data is gathered...

This is a brand new blog site dedicated to the specialty technologies supported by the Microsoft CSS Server Core teams. Topics in this blog will cover the following: Backup & restore Windows Failover Clustering Windows OS installation Data Protection Manager Storage Virtual Server...