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by lunarg on October 19th 2015, at 14:06

In a Windows Failover Cluster, you can move roles from one node to another node using the Failover Cluster Manager. Unfortunately, the GUI in 2008 R2 does not provide a way to move the quorum disk to another node. For this, you need to use the cluster command-line tool. This tool allows complete management of the cluster and its roles from the command-line, and this also includes moving the quorum disk.

Note that the cluster command-line tool no longer exist on 2012 and up. In that case, you need to use the Powershell cmdlets for Failover Cluster.

Each 2008R2 failover cluster comes default with two resource groups that are always present:

  • Available Storage contains all storage that hasn't been assigned to a role.
  • Cluster Group is a default resource group and, among others, contains the quorum disk.

You can view this by running the following on the command prompt:

cluster group
Listing status for all available resource groups:

Group                Node            Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group        NODE02          Online
Available Storage    NODE02          Online
MyClusterRole01      NODE01          Online

So, in order to move the quorum disk, one simply has to move the "Cluster Group" resource group to the destination node:

cluster group "Cluster Group" /moveto:NODE01
Moving resource group 'Cluster Group'...

Group                Node            Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group        NODE01          Online

This is a non-invasive procedure and can be done online and without any downtime.