In this demonstration,
I'll highlight some of the failover clustering‑related concepts we went over,
starting with Cloud Witness.
Now there is, by definition,
going to be some overlap among the different modules of the course,
and I want you to understand that's not accidental,
it's intentional.
Number one part of my effectiveness as a teacher is interweaving the
content within a course and between related courses.
Remember we have a number of courses that support AZ‑801.
And also as an adult educator for well over 20 years,
I know that repetition, especially when you're just learning,
is really important.
So, don't mind the repetition.
Let's open up VS Code and recall that with respect to quorum and witnesses,
we've got the various options, and it's easy as pie,
so to speak, to use PowerShell to create a witness of any kind.
Notice on line 18 in my PowerShell script,
Set‑ClusterQuorum and then CloudWitness.
And when you go down that route,
you have to provide the name of your Azure storage
account and one of your access keys.
How do you do that?
Again, this is good review.
Let's go into the Azure portal, and let's dial up my storage accounts.
And I have one called timstorage001.
And there's a number of ways to authenticate and
authorize access to a storage account.
The original way is with these access keys, which are, you know, sensitive.
You want to rotate them on a schedule, so they don't leak anywhere.
And unfortunately, in this example,
you could either do the raw text of the access key,
or frankly, if you were authenticated to Azure and Visual Studio Code,
we could retrieve the access key from KeyVault,
which would be a far superior option.
So that's the witness.
Another way to go, of course, is back in the Cluster Manager MMC.
We can right‑click our server, and we can come down to More Actions,
and we've got Configure Cluster Quorum Settings,
and that will allow us to step through a wizard to do the
same exact thing or to change your mind if you're already
using a particular kind of witness.
So in terms of some of those roles, you might remember in the previous lesson,
I ran into some dead ends trying to create a highly available virtual machine.
Now remember the procedure there is you're going to want to have
your cluster nodes up running and available,
and you also want to make sure that your shared storage is sorted out.
We used the enable storage spaces direct PowerShell
cmdlet to auto create this Cluster Pool 1,
this S2D pool.
And then within that pool, if I go down to Physical Disks,
it enlisted my two prepared disks in each of my two nodes.
And then we can then start to carve Virtual Disks from those PhysicalDisks,
and we can get over there on the Disks splayed as well.
And I showed you how to step through that wizard,
and then once you've created that resource,
you can add to or remove from the Cluster Shared
Volume simply by right‑clicking.
And the benefit of the Cluster Shared Volume,
or CSV,
is that you then have a mount point on every one of
your cluster nodes in the cluster, and it's the same path too,
see ClusterStorage vm‑disk.
Now I think my problem in the previous lesson,
let me go to Roles, I do have a virtual machine,
a highly available VM that's up and running and happy and ready to go.
I'm not going to go through the thing of creating one,
because, hopefully, you're coming out of the previous module.
But remember what you can do to do a highly available VM is
that you can either start from scratch and go through the
Hyper‑V New Virtual Machine wizard.
You choose a node, and then you can just step through the wizard,
or you can use PowerShell, whatever you want to do.
The other way to go is configure role, and then in the High Availability Wizard,
you can choose Virtual Machine,
and that will enumerate any VMs that are detected on any of your
nodes that have the Hyper‑V role installed.
So once you're there, once the VM is up and running,
there are a number of things that we can do here,
including right‑clicking and Manage to open up the Hyper‑V Manager directly.
Because, after all, I'm on cluster node MEM1 right now and by definition,
it has the Hyper‑V role and the Hyper‑V Management Tools already installed.
Anyway, long story short,
my problem from the previous lesson is I was not storing the hard drive,
and the VM configuration in the Cluster Shared Volume.
I know it's grayed out because the VMs running,
but notice that this virtual machine's virtual hard disk is in the
VM disk virtual disk under C:\ClusterStorage.
That's critical because that makes the VM available to all nodes in the cluster,
and that will make live migration a snap.
What I actually needed to do is at the Hyper‑V host level,
go into Hyper‑V Settings and notice that I changed the Virtual Machines
property to the CSV that I want to use in that case.
Hopefully, that makes sense.
Now you'll see I already have a node called Scale‑Out File Server,
let me show you and work through the highly available
file share business with you right now.
Let's go through, right‑click, Configure Role,
and let's skip this first page, so we don't see it anymore.
We'll choose the File Server as our role,
and then we're asked that question is this going to be an
ordinary File Server or a Scale‑Out File Server?
I'm going to do a File Server.
Give it a name.
I'll call this, let's see, how about I call it az801fs.
And then we have a Client Access Point, this needs to be an unused address,
and we can validate that by nominating an address
and validating by hitting Next.
And if there's a conflict, that'll work, it will show available storage.
In this case, we've got our CSV that I created before class called sofs‑disk,
and this is selecting the storage volume that I want to assign.
Now you'd have to have that created.
Now it's telling me that at least one disk needs to have a drive letter,
aha, so that is, let's see, so we're going to have to do some work here.
And again, this tends to happen with me when I'm demoing,
and it can be a good troubleshooting experience.
So let's go to sofs‑disk, and then let's come down below.
When I created the Volume, I obviously didn't do a drive letter,
so let me right‑click the Volume and change the drive letter,
and I'm just going to call this drive F for file share.
How's that?
So we'll do that.
And now that that CSV volume is available,
it has a drive letter, so it's anchored.
That drive letter needs to be available on all nodes, by the way.
Let me configure the role, File Server, Next,
File Server for general use, I had called this az801fs,
and I used, I think, 88 as my client access address,
and that'll be registered as a hostname in DNS.
I'll select the sofs‑disk virtual disk that's in the Cluster Shared Volumes.
We're ready to configure, Next.
Okay, so it tells us here that the network name is az801fs.
We've got a virtual IP, so okay good, so let's go to az801fs, our running File Server.