Using shared folders to implement the quorum disk for a failover cluster

Using shared folders to implement the quorum disk for a failover cluster

In the previous blog post we've introduced how to build a Distributed File System (DFS), and we've explained how to configure DFS to be highly available, so today's blog post We'll show you how to use DFS to make our Windows cluster arbitration disk.

Don't know if you know me in front of the blog post Why do I want to be highly available for DFS configuration, in fact, I configure the purpose of high availability not only to achieve our distributed File system fault tolerance, but more importantly for our failover cluster today to pave the groundwork. The friends who understand the failover cluster know that the failover cluster pair is dependent on the quorum disk, so we want to make sure that the quorum disk is the least likely to fail, so I configured the DFS to be highly available in the previous experiment.

The server and IP address required for the experiment are shown in the following table:

Computer name	Operating system	IP Address	Dns	Cluster Name/IP
DC	Windows Server R2	Public:192.168.1.1\24	192.168.1.1
NWEB01	Windows Server R2	Public:192.168.1.2\24 Hart:172.16.1.1\24	192.168.1.1	Name Dfscluster ip:192.168.1.10
NWEB2	Windows Server R2	Public:192.168.1.3\24 Hart:172.16.1.2\24	192.168.1.1

Note: Windows cluster must be integrated with the domain, so we use DC as a domain controller and join two other servers to the domain (this step does not demonstrate)

Experimental section:

To install a failover cluster:

Open Server Manager for "NWEB01":

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Click "Add Roles and Features":

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On the Select Features page, tick "Failover Cluster" and click Next:

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Confirm the error, click Install:

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Installation is successful, click Close.

The failover clustering feature also needs to be installed on "NWEB2", the same steps as "NWEB01", where I do not demonstrate!

After the installation is complete, open the Server Manager for "NWEB01":

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Click "Tools"----"Failover Cluster Manager":

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Click Verify configuration:

Note: Be sure to use the tools that are available with the cluster before you create the failover to verify that our configuration meets the requirements for establishing a cluster.

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Click here to add the two server "NWEB01" and "NWEB2" that we want to create as a cluster to the selected server:

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After adding the success, click Next:

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Select Run all tests here and click Next:

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The test is complete because we do not have the quorum disk configured, so verify that all warnings are about the quorum disk, and here we ignore it and click Done.

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After clicking Finish the system will pop up the Create Cluster wizard and click Next:

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Enter the cluster name and cluster IP we have designed here, and click Next:

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Confirm that there is no problem, click Next:

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Once created, you can see the system prompt "Unable to find the appropriate disk for the quorum disk", which we will address.

Configure a failover cluster to use this shared folder as a witness

Open Failover Cluster Manager:

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Click dfscluster.contoso.com:

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You can see the word "Witness: none", stating that our cluster currently has no quorum disk, and let's configure the quorum disk for it:

right mouse button "dfscluster.contoso.com":

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Click "More Actions"----"Configure cluster quorum settings":

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The system pops up the "Configure Cluster Quorum Wizard" and click Next:

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Note: Tick "Select Quorum Witness" here and click Next:

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Because we want to use the shared folder as a witness, we need to tick "profile sharing Witness" here, click Next:

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Here we enter the file share path (DFS access Path): \\contoso.com\DFS-SHARE\HR-SHARE, click Next:

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Confirm here and click Next:

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You can see that our file share witness is enabled and click Done:

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OK, you can see our witness location has been shown as "Witness: File Share Witness (\\contoso.com\dfs-share\hr-share)"

OK, experiment here to see our witness location has successfully enabled the file share witness, which proves that our experiment has been successful!

This article from "Mr, Wu's Microsoft Blog" blog, reproduced please contact the author!

Using shared folders to implement the quorum disk for a failover cluster