Oh,
looks like I've got some problems. You knew that anyway about
me, but I'm talking about the failover cluster. And if we
expand the storage system particularly,
this is where we can get into our pools. This is where we
can get into our virtual disks that may or may not be part
of a cluster shared volume.
All right, so to get to this point,
this is some review earlier in the course, there was just this single
PowerShell cmdlet. To enable cluster storage direct, you specify the name of
the cluster. In my case, it's az801cluster. Optionally, you can provide a
pool‑friendly name, and that will go through and enlist all available
unallocated storage on those nodes, simple as that.
And then from now on, any new nodes will be enlisted into the cluster, so
it's a pretty powerful operation. And I found reverse engineering it trying
to get out of a Storage Spaces Direct environment to be pretty painful, so
I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
All right, so as you can see here,
I've got my single cluster pool, and we can report on it in Failover Cluster
Manager down below. Our used space is a half a TB. Our capacity is 506. Wow!
I'm running pretty low on free space here.
We can report on the physical disks that are included here.
We've got looks like two on one node and two on the other.
I can tell that only because of the IDs. And then we have
the virtual disks that we've created here for various
reasons and a couple like my VM disk,
I've added to Cluster Shared Volume, so it's mounted under the point
C:\ClusterStorage\vm‑disk on all cluster nodes.
The default virtual disk is ClusterPerformanceHistory.
You may see some additional system created disks in terms of, especially
actually, if you're doing tiered storage. And then ultimately,
as I said, we can manage those individual disks here.
Like, for example,
if we pick on this test disk, right‑click. We can take the disk
offline. We can filter event log. We can replicate that storage
using storage replication. We can go to its properties where it just
shows us things like dependencies, how you want to handle resource failure.
This is a similar motif to how you would handle a Windows service if you
want the storage to, if there's a failure, for Windows to attempt a certain
number of times within a certain waiting period to try to restart the
storage. And notice that we have the preferred owner policy for storage for
our virtual disks, as well as for our nodes. That means, of course, that we
can right‑click one of these virtual disks. And besides enabling
replication, we can simulate failure to see that failover take place, as
well as assign to another role if you want to associate a clustered role
with another virtual disk, or is there anything else in there?
Show Dependency Report, no that's about it.
Long story short,
I strongly suggest that you click around in here. And when you're
browsing Failover Cluster Manager, practice right‑clicking on
just about everything to get an idea of what possibilities exist
within this control plane.
And you'll remember by means of review that Windows Admin
Center is slowly catching up in parity.
You can do probably the most common failover cluster administration in
the browser. But for anything really substantial,
you'll want to work either in Windows PowerShell or here in the Failover Cluster Manager.