Add-ClusterFileServerRole unassigns the driveletter assigned to the clusteravailable disk and assings some other drive letter

Question

Hello,

I am using windows 2019 core OS and created 2 node cluster with FailoverCluster Manager.

Steps followed

1. Discover the iscsi volume from Node1 and connect to it
2. set the volume state to online
3. Initialize the disk
4. partition and assign drive letter Z: and format it
5. Discover the same iscsi volume from Node2 and connect to it
6. Get-volume shows Z:\ for the volume
7. Get-ClusterAvailableDisk did list this volume
8. Get-ClusterAvailableDisk | Add-ClusterDisk
9. Add-ClusterFileServerRole with this volume ( Cluster Disk 2)
10. After the fileserver role has been added successfully, Get-voulme shows the drive letter as E:\ on Node1
11. The same E:\ was assigned to Quorum volume and it was owned by Node2

This seems to be an issue, i have couple of questions here

1. Why the drive letter i assigned got unassigned and some other drive letter got assigned
2. Even the automatic drive letter which was assigned after the fileserver role enabled seems to not have the driveletter which is next free available driveletter considering this is a cluster environment, as now i have E:\ point the fileserver in node1 and quorum in node2.

Can anyone please let me know if you have seen this behavior. Am i missing something here.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Answer 1

Hi,

Thank you for your posting!

Based on your descriptions, I would like to suggest you to manually change your drive letter of your volume that has enabled file share role, to see whether will change your manually assigned in force again.

To change your drive letter in a cluster, you can open your Failover Cluster Manager>> Storage >> Disks, choose the target volume, right click the volume and click Change Drive letter and Path:

Thank you for your support!

Best regards
Joann

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Answer 2

Thanks Joann for the response. I will give it a try.

I am also interested to know, instead of doing a workaround to sort this issue, is there a way, we can create a fileserver role without this drive letter discrepancies.
Is this a known issue and do we have any recommended method to sort it out.

Answer 3

Hi,

Thank you for your reply!

I am glad to hear that you have received my suggestion. With regards to your additional question:

"is there a way, we can create a fileserver role without this drive letter discrepancies."

I suppose it can be hard for you to get rid of drive letter discrepancies if this discrepancies is caused by the the operation system's automount option. By default, the Automount option is enabled on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Vista. If you disable this option, you may fail to the storage portion of the Validate a Configuration Wizard. More information about automount:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/cc753703(v=ws.11)

So, if you want to take charged of disk assignment, you can try to manually change your drive letter after successfully adding a file server role.

Thank you for your understanding!

Best regards
Joann

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