I was able to resolve my original problem, which was no being able to add file shares to a clustered "file server." The thread linked here solved the problem for me. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserver8gen/thread/9807a799-bea3-46ad-92a5-732779135f98
>>> On 12/6/2012 at 11:03 AM, Steven Peck <[email protected]> wrote: While I like your summary for the most part, evidently my experience with MS Clusters while admittedly dated, windows2003 era mostly Exchange and SQL, we didn't experience them as fragile. Complex yes, but most issues were the result of shooting ourselves in the foot rather then the cluster technology itself. With the Best Practice Analyzers this is easier to avoid now. But we're back to what is meant/desired goal of the original post. 'VMware clusters' provide for resilience and reduced downtime. If hardware fails, all guests on that node are dead. True, the remaining live nodes will usually bring them up quickly but they are still dead until then and if there were dependencies, etc. the various services may still need manual intervention. So, if you need a service availability then you need to look at your SLA and match them with the various options.. So, this thread started with one thing and then wandered afar into various technologies.... What needs to be solved? On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 8:35 AM, Ken Cornetet <[email protected]> wrote: Patrick, I am sorry if I came across as attacking your choices. My intention was to steer you toward a path that will lead to a happier future for you. The purpose of clustering is to protect against downtime in case something fails, or is intentionally taken down for preventative maintenance. So here are some "somethings" that might happen: 1. Hardware failure. Both MS and VMWare clustering will protect against this. 2. OS failure - the OS bluescreens. Both MS and VMWare protect against this. VMWare detects missing vmware tools heartbeats and migrates the server. 3. The application service crashes (stops). You don't need clustering to protect against this, you set the service to auto-restart. 4. The application service gets lost in space and stops working (but is still running). Neither MS or VMWare can protect against this without you hitching on some sort of monitoring system. 5. Patching or other PM. This is where MS clustering can *theoretically* reduce (not eliminate) downtime if you have an active/passive cluster. In an active/passive cluster, you patch the passive system, reboot, fail over to it, then patch and reboot the original active server. However, there is still down time as the service is stopped on one node and restarted on the other. The only thing that MS clustering eliminates is the time of the server reboot. In VMWare, virtuals boot so fast that this only saves you less than a minute. MS clusters have some disadvantages: 1. Most every service that you run clustered has limitations and caveats when running clustered. 2. Backing up the data requires a cluster aware backup agent. 3. You application settings have to be replicated between nodes - usually manually. This can lead to problems when they aren't in sync. 4. MS clusters are "fragile". In the old days (windows 2000) clusters would go toes up for little or no reason and you'd have to spend hours tweaking registry settings and disk signatures to get it back up. This improved vastly with Server 2003 - clusters stop failing for no reason, but even at Server 2008 R2, clusters are a pain to do disaster recovery with. In contrast, VMWare clusters just work, and work seamlessly. You don't need to take anything special into account on your protected virtuals. Normal application settings, normal backups, etc. There is no extra complexity to manage. Admittedly, I've not looked at Server 2012's clustering because we've been migrating away from MS clusters. -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Hasenjager [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 9:16 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: File Services Clustering in Server 2012 If that is not the purpose of failover clustering, what would your definition be? Maybe I need to go another route to resolve this, as it seems that all people want to do is attack the choices we have made for our institution. >>> Ken Cornetet <[email protected]> 12/6/2012 7:46 AM >>> Maybe I'm missing something. What it is you hope to protect against? I not sure what you mean by "services" clustering. Are you thinking that if somehow the server service gets hosed on one node of the cluster that MS clustering will switch over to the other node? -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Hasenjager [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 5:17 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: File Services Clustering in Server 2012 We want "services" clustering in addition to the hardware clustering already in our ESXi environment. >>> Ken Cornetet <[email protected]> 12/5/2012 4:03 PM >>> Why in the world would you use a Microsoft cluster when you have the vastly superior and easier ESX clustering to provide failover? -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Hasenjager [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 4:33 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: File Services Clustering in Server 2012 We are just getting into clustering services, now that we have been allowed to purchase a SAN (we have only been asking for more years than I can count!). I created a failover cluster in Server 2012 Standard and attached 4 nodes to it (all virtuals with VMware ESXi 5.1 - the same problem exists whether 1 node is connected or up to all 4). They are connected to common LUNs on a NetApp appliance. Yesterday, everything went to hell. It started off that I could not access one of the file shares and then two... then all 4 that we had configured. Because this system was not yet being utilized for anyone other than myself, I decided to just recreate it. Now that I have done that, I cannot configure any file shares. When I click the "Add File Share" to the cluster role (File Server), the "volumes" is blank and I cannot use the browse button. I can type a path, but it states that it is not valid for the particular server. According to the console, everything is "Running" and "Online." I also cannot access the administrative share for the drive which is attached to the role. I am at a complete loss for ideas and Internet searches have turned up absolutely nothing regarding the problem I am having. I'm sure I am missing something simple, but cannot come up with what that is. Can anyone assist me? Feel free to contact me off-list if it is more convenient. 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