It’s a dark night, you’re in a cold murky alley. There’s a random file found in the root of your drive (or mount point). Suddenly, your cluster goes offline. WTF!
If you’re thinking, “Damnit, what did my storage vendor do now!” You’d be mistaken.
Microsoft declares it to happen when you meet the following scenario:
You have a Windows Server 2008 cluster node.
The IsAlive function is executed on the cluster node while a file is being accessed in the root folder of the cluster disk.
In this scenario, a physical disk resource on the Windows Server 2008 cluster node may unexpectedly fail or go offline. This behavior occurs randomly.
Or otherwise read as: If you have a file in the root of Drive letter or Mount point, the drive may ‘disappear’ when you have this configured in a cluster (This does not apply to Server 2008 single servers)
Quite often this is blamed on the storage (regardless of vendor) so be sure to keep your clusters up to spec and make sure to apply this Hotfix from Microsoft, especially if you meet this criteria!
Good luck Clusters, and those cold dark alleys won’t be so bad.
Every so often I get asked by people for help improving their skills, making them more marketable as well as ways to get access to training and resources.
And more often than not, I lead them in directions with the huge cost of $0.00 associated with it. Whether you’re looking for Certification, access to Labs, E-Books, or Training information.
Thanks to our friends at Microsoft, here is another resource available to you!
By visiting this lovely site, it will display all of the available courses being offered by Microsoft Learning for Free!
What relevant topics are available on there at the moment:
SQL 2008
Application Virtualization
Terminal Services in Server 2008
Virtual Machine Manager for 2008
Hyper-V
ASP.NET
.NET Framework
Windows Security
Microsoft Security Guidance I-IV
…And more!
Seriously, there is a motherload of information here, so much training to wrap your teeth into!
If you saw my previous post about the voucher to get the Hyper-V training for free, this training is very complimentary to that and more! (Especially since that voucher seems to be faulty at the moment)
So get out there, get yourself something Free for this season. It’s your education, do something about it!
Raise your hands up and praise Joanne Lin of the MSLCommunity for bringing us these little gems! (Gem1 and Gem2 ! :)) [Time for some verbatim copying!...kind of!]
Help celebrate our 25th anniversary with a free e-book offer. The November offers is valid from November 19 to November 26, 2008, so download the e-books soon. You can also sign up for Microsoft Press Connection newsletter to get monthly update.
For November:
Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Fundamentalsby Stanslav Pavlov and Pavel Belevsky: This book examines the architecture, built-in programming tools, drivers, and build process, and shows how to take advantage of the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Software Development Kit (SDK).
Windows Server 2008 Networking and Network Access Protection (NAP)by Joseph Davies and Tony Northrup with the Microsoft Networking Team: Get the official resource for deploying, administering, and troubleshooting Windows Server 2008 networking and Network Access Protection (NAP) technologies.
Microsoft Learning is teaming up with the SQL Server team to give away free copies of SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition to people who attend select instructor-led classroom training at a Microsoft Certified Partner for Learning Solutions (CPLS). Here’s the deal: The Deal!
So, if you’re looking for an early gift for yourself, or your friends.. Get them the Ebook that keeps on giving! :)
Happy Holiday-Season-Time! And spend that good money in this economy of free!
To make it easier to find out what tests are currently available in general and in Beta’s, I’m creating this “link” more or less, which I’ll keep current as I can. – All dates update 04/15/09