New-Cluster tries to cluster wrong disks

Dell chassis with two blade servers and storage.

Three virtual disks on the chassis presented to both servers.

Each server has two disks on local storage, for local C and D drives.

Windows Server 2012 R2

I am trying to automate the configuration of the servers, including clustering them.

When I run Test-Cluster, the report shows it identified all of the drives on each node, and knows that only the three shared disks are to be validated for clustering.

When I run:

New-Cluster -Name Cluster1 -Node Server1, Server2, -StaticAddress 10.10.10.10

the three shared disks are correctly clustered.

But it is also doing something with the local D drives.  After the command runs, the disks containing the D drives are offline and readonly on both servers.  If I try to bring one of them online, I get:

set-disk : The specified object is managed by the Microsoft Failover Clustering component. The disk must be in cluster
maintenance mode and the cluster resource status must be online to perform this operation.

How do I get New-Cluster to ignore my local D: d

September 1st, 2015 8:12pm

I cleared up some of my confusion. It had been reported that everything was working normally when they did the build manually. But it turns out that when they had been doing the build manually, they had been converting the disk with the D volume to dynamic, which would have made it undesirable, if not outright it invisible to the New-Cluster command. The desired configuration has since been changed to not include any conversion to dynamic disks.

But that doesn't solve my current problem. Am I forced to either add steps to pull the non-clustered disks back out of cluster control after the cluster is created or to have New-Cluster ignore all storage and add steps to add the desired disks "manually"? Or is there a way to get New-Cluster to ignore my local D: drives?

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September 1st, 2015 8:47pm

Hi Tim,

what you can do is to add the switch -NoStorage.

This will leave all disks out of the cluster. Once the cluster is created, just run this:
Get-ClusterAvailableDisk | Add-ClusterDisk.

Best Regards,
Jens


September 1st, 2015 8:49pm

Thank you, Jens.

I removed the cluster, and reran New-Cluster using the -NoStorage switch.

But when I run Get-ClusterAvailableDisk, it lists all 5 disks, the 3 shared disks that are supposed to be there, plus the D drive disk from each node, labeled as Cluster Disk 1 and Cluster Disk 2.  Why are these local disks being identified as cluster disks?  That's not normal, is it?

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September 1st, 2015 10:16pm

Tim Curwick

It seems is the known issue and you can refer the following KB to solve it.

Local SAS Disks Getting Added in Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2813005

Im glad to be of help to you!

September 3rd, 2015 3:28am

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