Win Server 2022 Failover Cluster - Dead, can I remove all traces without rebuild from scratch

Question

Friends,

After a few years away from the Windows World (Unix/MacOS) ive recently spent 3 weeks in hell trying to get a simple Failover Cluster up and running. I really just need to confirm some things before deciding wether to continue.

Note I finally got it up and running a couple of days ago with 2 Virtual Machines on Hyper-V in Cluster Roles and then today we had a power outage while I was away (small farm business) resulting in the SAN box (Synology), switches LAN & SAN and both IDENTICAL nodes (Intel NUCs with identical configs and hardware) going down.

When I brought it back up it was completely borked. I cannot recover it. Cluster Services just bouncing on each node up the down, repeat.

Ive tried the usual Clear-ClusterNode, Remove-Cluster and Remove-ClusterNode etc - nothing works.

I've restored both nodes from Backups going further back in time a few times (I do hourly backups)

I decided in frustration to wipe it from the disk, removed the Feature (and reboot), removed the iSCSI disks and even clean formatted them. I searched the Registry and there is no Cluster settings under HKEY_LOCAL. I also looked at the registry Ole hive and it's full of gibberish entries I'm too scared to touch. :-)

When I try to create a new cluster I get an AD access denied error despite doing this as a Domain Administrator.

I'm at my wits end.

I'm 99% about to walk away from Failover Cluster as frankly it can't handle a failure and seems to make recovery worse/longer/pointless.

Here are my questions that I'd appreciate answer to:

1. Is there anyway to completely remove ALL traces of the old Cluster from the nodes, files, registry anything else.
2. is my experience that a total loss of both nodes and shared storage renders a cluster unrecoverable?
3. am I cursed?

I truly appreciate any info or feedback.

Cheers,

Paul.

Answer 1

Hi,

You can disable the Failover Cluster feature from Server Manager. The failover cluster files are under C:\Windows\Cluster and the cluster database is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Cluster and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\0.Cluster in registry. These files and registry hives should be automatically removed when the Failover Cluster feature is disabled.

If all the nodes are offline, try to force the cluster to start without a quorum. Please follow the steps in the below link to recover the failover cluster.

Disaster Recovery through forced quorum

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

Answer 2

Thanks Ian

I did delete those HIVES or rather didn't have to bas they were already gone.

Weirdl every time I tried to create a new cluster I got probelms

In the end it was easier to delete both machines and rebuild from scratch.

I'm treading more carefully from here on - I'm making "snapshots" with Windows Server Backup as well as my SANbackup tool.

Imm going to play/test Failover Cluster on virtual machines until I'm convinced its stable.

Again thanks so much for your input..

P

Answer 3

Yes, I agree. It's always important to make backups and separate the test and production environments.

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

Answer 4

If you or anyone else is looking for a suggestion for this, I was able to remove the cluster name from my server by running PowerShell (as admin)

Clear-ClusterNode

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/failoverclusters/clear-clusternode?view=windowsserver2022-ps

It worked for me. Maybe it'll help someone else.