Moving witness cluster disk to another node

Morning,

corona lockdown is almost over (i hope), and today i had a task to reconfigure one cluster machine. One of the task that is not done very often is moving quorum witness disk to another cluster node. Why do it? Let say I am freak and doesn’t want that some automation under the hood is discovering that my node is gone (or restarted) , and that second node should take over witness disk.

So let asume you are GUI fan. Can we do it there?

Don’t believe so! Only way we can move quorum disk to another node is using PowerShell cluster cmdlets. If you have Windows Server prior 2012 version, there was cluster.exe command installed by default. You can still install it, but you have powershell already there.

So where to find witness in PowerShell . Let’s start with finding witness disk. Lets type Get-ClusterGroup

You will see Available Storage, Cluster Group, and down below names of more clusters that you have. We already know what is Available Storage! What is Cluster Group? Lets investigate what is inside. Type next powershell command.

You will see that Cluster Group is containing Witness disk. To move witness disk to another node you need to move cluster group name ‘Cluster group’ to another node. You do this with command Move-clustergroup

Now, your witness disk is moved to node you decided

Just for historic reasons cluster.exe command line to  move witness disk is:

cluster group “Cluster Group” /move

I hope it helped, and that we will fight corona big time

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