First off, apologies to the 3 readers I have (I don’t read my blog post, I just write), since all of them are far better than I am when it comes to clustering.
To cut it short: how can you move ANY resource from one node to another? Namely, the disk witness in the quorum cannot be moved using the Failover Cluster Manager GUI:
So what to do, what to do? When, after a 1 second Google search, I found couple of resources. Not to keep you too much (if you need to read more than 5 minutes, I’m in deep trouble):
Cluster.exe <<servername>> group – this one (of course, after you replace <<servername>> with your actual server name) will list all of the available resources:
Group Node Status
—————————————-
Cluster Group Est21DB Online
Available Storage Est21DB Online
EST20_21Dtc Est21DB Online
SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER) EST20DB Online
OK, so now I have my SQL Server on one node, and the rest of the resources on the other node.
For the brilliance, I decided to move the “cluster group” resource, since this is going to move everything, right?
cluster.exe est20_21 group “cluster group” /moveto:est20db – and then let’s run again to check that everything is moved to whatever node I choose (in my case, est20db):
Group Node Status
—————————————-
Cluster Group Est20DB Online
Available Storage Est21DB Online
EST20_21Dtc Est21DB Online
SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER) EST20DB Online
So I was obviously wrong – moving the “cluster group” did not move anything but the “cluster group”. Aaargh, the shared nothing principle (thank you, Alan Hirt, for your great book).
So, if I really want to move the quorum drive, I need to move the “Storage” group like this:
cluster.exe est20_21 group “available storage” /moveto:est20db
Moral of the story: you cannot move all the resources at once – I personally find “cluster group” to be a bit misleading, but again, I’m less than a novice when it comes to clustering.
I hope this helps someone out there.
Best regards,
io
SQL-PLAY 