Notice: This website is an unofficial Microsoft Knowledge Base (hereinafter KB) archive and is intended to provide a reliable access to deleted content from Microsoft KB. All KB articles are owned by Microsoft Corporation. Read full disclaimer for more details.

Failover Cluster Validation wizard does not test Dynamic Disks


View products that this article applies to.

Symptoms

Consider this scenario:
  • You have a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Failover Clustering configured.
  • You have Symantec Storage Foundation for Windows installed and configured to manage disks.
  • You do not get the Review Storage Status screen while running the Cluster validation wizard and the storage tests are skipped.

↑ Back to the top


Cause

This happens if disks configured for cluster use are using Dynamic Disks. The Failover Cluster Validation wizard is designed to test and verify that storage is compatible with the in-box Physical Disk cluster resource, which does not support Dynamic Disks. 

Dynamic Disk support on a Failover Cluster is provided by leveraging the Storage Foundation for Windows product, which uses a seperate cluster resource DLL and has its own unique set of requirements.  Validate is not designed to test Dynamic Disks and will exclude Dynamic Disks from its set of storage tests.

↑ Back to the top


Workaround

It is expected behavior that Dynamic Disks on a Failover Cluster leveraging Symantec Storage Foundations for Windows will not be tested by Validate and if all disks are configured using Dynamic Disks, the Validate storage tests may be skipped completely.

↑ Back to the top


More Information

You may see following warnings in the Validation report if the storage tests are skipped.

List Potential Cluster Disks
List disks visible to two or more nodes that will be validated for cluster compatibility. Online clustered disks will be excluded.

No disks were found on which to perform cluster validation tests. To correct this, review the following possible causes:

* The disks are already clustered and currently Online in the cluster. When testing a working cluster, ensure that the disks that you want to test are Offline in the cluster.
* The disks are unsuitable for clustering. Boot volumes, system volumes, disks used for paging or dump files, and disks that do not use NTFS are examples of disks unsuitable for clustering.
* The disks are not visible to two or more nodes. Review the "List All Disks" test to see which disks are visible to the nodes. Ensure that the disks you want to test are unmasked, that is, your masking or zoning does not prevent access to the disks. If the disks seem to be unmasked or zoned correctly but could not be tested, try restarting the servers before running the validation tests again.
* The cluster does not use shared storage. A cluster must use a hardware or software based replication solution to replicate data between nodes. If your solution is in fact based on replication between nodes, you do not need to rerun Storage tests. Instead, work with the provider of your replication solution to ensure that data is being replicated between nodes.

No disks were found on which to perform cluster validation tests.

↑ Back to the top


References

Dynamic Disks with Windows Server Failover Clustering
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2009/12/15/9937435.aspx

Dynamic disk configuration unavailable for server cluster disk resources
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237853

↑ Back to the top


Keywords: kb

↑ Back to the top

Article Info
Article ID : 2693046
Revision : 1
Created on : 1/7/2017
Published on : 3/22/2012
Exists online : False
Views : 564