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Verify Cluster Components in place
The Failover Clustering management console provides a list of links in the main display area. One of those is Validate a Configuration. This will give a nice report to assist with tying up any loose ends you may not have thought of. This step is not required, but I highly recommend completing it. A good rule of thumb is to address every error and warning until running the validation wizard yields a green check mark indicating success. One of the more common items to address is matching service packs and updates on each host.
Begin by validating your configuration
Create cluster
- Now that validation has passed to ensure our environment is ready, the cluster can be created.
- Open Failover Clustering and click Create Cluster.
- Add the nodes that will be participating in the cluster.
- When prompted for a name and IP address, provide an IP for the client network. This will be the IP address of the cluster object. The cluster name you input will become the name of the computer object in Active Directory that represents the cluster. For this example, I’ll call it VMCluster.
Create Cluster Wizard: Specify IP address for cluster
One of the final screens in the wizard will display a summary of results. If you’ve been following along with my instructions and have an even number of nodes, you’ll see a warning stating ‘No appropriate disk could be found for the quorum disk.’. No need for alarm here as the Node and Disk Majority quorum type simply hasn’t been setup yet.
Create Cluster Wizard warning regarding no quorum disk found
Add Disks to Cluster
- Now let’s get the disks added that will be used for our quorum and cluster shared volume.
- Expand your new cluster in the left pane of the Failover Cluster Manager.
- Right-click Storage and select Add Disk. Select the two disks and click OK.
- Right-click and select Properties for each disk. Customize the name to something more meaningful. For my example, my quorum disk is 256MB and I renamed that to VMQuorum. The disk I’ll be using in this example is 100GB and I renamed it to Cluster Shared Volume 1.
Without Storage Adding Storage Updating Disk Name
Configure Node and Disk Majority Quorum
After initial creation, the cluster will default to the Node Majority quorum type. If you have an odd number of nodes, this option will work for you. If you have an even number of nodes than the quorum type should be changed to Node and Disk Majority.
We change the quorum type by right-clicking the cluster object in the left pane, hovering More Actions, and then click Configure Cluster Quorum Settings.
- Select Node and Disk Majority and click Next.
- Available storage will be displayed. Choose the volume called VMQuorum.
- Another Next and Finish and the main pane of Failover Cluster Manager will display the updated status of your cluster.
Right-click cluster object to modify quorum Choose quorum type
Select a disk to use as Storage Witness Updated summary showing new quorum configuration
In this post, we validated that our configuration was correct and ready for us to configure clustering. We also added disks and modified the quorum type. In the next and final post in this series, we’ll enable cluster shared volumes and add existing and new virtual machines.
