Welcome everyone. This is Chuck Timon back this time to discuss a minor ‘annoyance’ in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2. Those of you that have worked with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 for a while and have configured Failover Clusters to be managed by Virtual Machine manager, may have seen this display before and, perhaps, became a little concerned –
The display is accessed by examining File Share Storage which is a Property of a Failover Cluster object in the Virtual Machine Manager console (In the SCVM Console, Right-Click of Failover Cluster object, choose Properties and then select File Share Storage). In a perfect world, where the planets are all aligned correctly, the display would look like this –
Looking at the full display, there is an option to Repair each of the File Shares that reflects this ‘unknown’ status.
Selecting each of the File Shares and choosing Repair, will execute a small job to run in Virtual Machine Manager –
Even executing a complete refresh of the entire cluster, executes a “refresh” of the registered file shares.
PowerShell can be used to verify the file shares registered to this cluster. As an example, I can run this –
Get-VMHostCluster -Name Contoso-FC1 | Get-SCStorageFileShare | FL `
ID,Name,SharePath,ObjectState,IsManaged,Enabled,ClusterAssociations
A sample of the output would look like this –
Here I see information for two of the registered file shares. I see they are ‘Online’, they are ‘Managed’ by Virtual Machine Manager and they are ‘associated’ with the 3-Node cluster they are registered on. At this point I should feel pretty good. I also know that all the virtual machines that are hosted on those file shares are up and running and providing valuable services in the environment. If I don’t have total faith in the ‘Repair’ button, I can manually run a Repair myself in PowerShell –
$VMHostCluster = (Get-SCVMHostCluster -Name Contoso-FC1)
$FileShare = Get-SCStorageFileShare -Name “TestingCSV1”
Repair-SCStorageFileShare -StorageFileShare $FileShare -VMHostCluster $VMHostCluster
After all of this, you may still see the display with all the question marks in the ‘Access’ column. If you are like me, I prefer to see green checkmarks.
A quick way to either make all the green checkmarks appear, or surface any issues that need to be addressed, is to access the Properties of one of the nodes in the cluster in the Virtual Machine Manager Console and choose the Storage view. Once there, collapse all of the Storage listings except for File Shares.
Scroll through some of the shares in the list by highlighting them and ensuring the ‘Access to share’ shows a green checkmark. After scrolling through a few, you should re-inspect the File Share Storage on the Failover cluster and you should see something like above with all the green checkmarks.
Thanks for reading our blog, and I hope you found this helpful.