Removing a drive from a cluster group moves all cluster group resources to Available Storage

Problem

During routine maintenance on a SQL Server cluster we were planning to remove one of the clustered drives. We had previously replaced the SAN, and this disk was backed by an old storage unit that we wanted to decommission. So we made sure that there were no dependencies, right-clicked the drive in Failover Cluster Manager under the SQL Server role and pressed “Remove from SQL Server”. Promptly the drive vanished from view, together with all other cluster resources associated with the role…

After a slightly panicky check to make sure that the SQL Server instance was still running (it was), we started to wonder about what was happening. Running Get-ClusterResource in PowerShell revealed that all our missing resources had been moved to the “Available Storage” resource group.

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We did a failover to verify that the instance was still working, and it gladly failed over with the Available Storage group. There is a total of 4 instances of SQL Server on the sample cluster pictured above.

Solution

The usual warning: Performing this procedure may result in an outage. If you do not understand the commands, read up on them before you try.

Move the resources back to the SQL Server resource group. If you move the SQL Server resource, that is the resource with the ResourceType SQL Server, all other dependent resources should follow. If your dependency settings are not configured correctly, you may have to move some of the resources independently.

Command: Get-ClusterResource “SQL Server (instance)”|Move-ClusterResource –Group “SQL Server (instance)”

Just replace Instance with the name of your SQL Server instance.

Then, run Get-ClusterResource|Sort-Object OwnerGroup, ResourceType to verify that all you resources are associated with the correct resource group. The result should look something like this. As a minimum, you should have an IP address, a network name, SQL Server, SQL Server Agent and one ore more Physical disk drives.

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Author: DizzyBadger

SQL Server DBA, Cluster expert, Principal Analyst

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