Cluster Disk in Failover Cluster Failed to Start (File Server)

Recently one of the customer had an upgrade in their firmware of their storage.  Their setup is as follow :

2 Hosts in Windows 2012 Server.  Using a shared storage and it’s setup with Windows 2012 Failover Cluster.

After both the hosts were rebooted, the Cluster Disk that was assigned as FileServer in the Failover Cluster failed to start.  From what I know it’s because both the hosts are assuming they are the owner of that particular Disk.  So both are locked to the resources.

I clicked on the “more details” to check it displayed as :

Further probing into the Disk Management and found that the Disk is in RAW. Before this it was in NTFS format.

Next I go into the shared Storage Management (which is the Dell Storage Manager in this scenario), tried to repair but in vain.  It displayed as follow :

After going through the logs as earlier on, found that the resource was locked due to both the hosts are assume they are the rightful owner and both are trying to write at the same time.  In a Windows cluster environment, there’s only one owner at any one time.

Therefore I launched a PowerShell ISE in Administrator mode.

Execute a command to clear the Cluster Disk Reservation on both the hosts

In my scenario as above, in the Disk Management it shows as Disk 6, I execute the command of :

Clear-ClusterDiskReservation –disk 6

 Note : change only the one in Pink according to the info from disk management

Resource of the command : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee461016.aspx 

After that, I started the FileServer and no issue.  The format was in NTFS and content was intact.

In the Failover cluster of the File Server :

Hopefully this helps.

keywords : cluster disk reserve, error 219, dell storage manager, disk in RAW format, incorrect function, cannot start up cluster disk file server, the requested resource is in use, persistent reservation