I thought the Scale-out fileserver role in Windows server cluster would be good for my file shares. I was wrong. Scale-out file server is for some special cases. It is mostly for Hyper-V and SQL server. If you use it as an ordinary file share it will be slow. Saving files to the cluster shares are much faster now that i have changed them to the older File server.
Month: September 2021
It is not impossible to get two node S2D cluster to handle a failover, but it is difficult. The nodes must always check if they in the majority of nodes. If a node believes it is not in the majority it must immediately shutdown cluster resources. As soon as i shutdown one node in two node cluster there is doubt on the remaining node if it belongs to the majority. That is why you need a witness. I used a file share witness. One time when i shutdown a node the other node failed to read the file share witness and the cluster went down. I fixed that by removing the witness from the cluster and added it back. A few days later i shutdown one node and the storage pool on the remaining node went offline. It said something about majority disks missing. At first i did not understand what that meant. After reading about storage pool quorum i understood it. A storage pool must always check if it has a majority of disks connected or else it will shutdown. If there is the same count of drives on both nodes a pool can stay up if it owns the pool resource. I had three HDDs and one SSD on both nodes so i did not know how to fix that. That was when i gave up on a two node cluster. A three node cluster is much easier. If one node disappears there is no doubt about it the two remaining nodes are a majority and if the nodes have equal amount of drives there be no question about if the pool have a majority of drives.