June 11, 2015 at 4:03 am
I'm working on a problem for one of my company's clients where they are having a problem with their 2-node active-active cluster and which has been failing over lately but not bringing resources back online. We've had a Microsoft engineer look at it and, among other things, he noted that it was unusual to have a Quorum group explicitly created under the Services and Applications node and thought that this might cause a problem. I'm a bit puzzled as to whether this is a factor or not. Certainly most of the documents on quorum disk configuration don't create a specific cluster group to contain the Quorum disk - just going through the Quorum Disk Configuration Wizard seems to be all that is required.
I had always thought of a Quorum disk as being a 'fixed point' - i.e. it doesn't belong to a cluster group and doesn't fail over when a node fails over as to do so might mean the cluster no longer being in quorum (quorate?). However other documents I've read do suggest that the Quorum disk does 'belong' to a node. However if you have an active-active configuration which one gets to own it?
Hope someone can help cut through my confusion.
Regards,
Gordon.
June 11, 2015 at 4:36 am
dba 11727 (6/11/2015)
he noted that it was unusual to have a Quorum group explicitly created under the Services and Applications node and thought that this might cause a problem.
Yep, almost certainly, seen this myself on a system that someone deployed.
Basically, don't create a group for the quorum disk. Leave the disk resource in the "available storage" group and run the cluster quorum config wizard, when you select the disk the resource it will automatically be added to the cluster "core group" along with the client access point resources.
Otherwise it's possible to a have a situation whereby the cluster core group is owned by nodea but the quorum disk group is owned by nodeb, I have observed some strange issues when this occurs.
dba 11727 (6/11/2015)
I'm a bit puzzled as to whether this is a factor or not.
don't create a quorum disk group, this is following the Windows 2003 architecture which is no longer relevant, clustering changed extensively from Windows 2003 MSCS to Windows 2008 WSFC
dba 11727 (6/11/2015)
I had always thought of a Quorum disk as being a 'fixed point' - i.e. it doesn't belong to a cluster group and doesn't fail over when a node fails over.
It's not a fixed point and will fail over between nodes as required whether MSCS or WSFC
dba 11727 (6/11/2015)
if you have an active-active configuration which one gets to own it?Hope someone can help cut through my confusion.
Regards,
Gordon.
Whoever owns the cluster core group and it's resources
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
June 11, 2015 at 4:46 am
Perry, many thanks. A very informative and useful response.
Regards,
Gordon.
June 11, 2015 at 5:32 am
Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply