Hello all!
I've inherited a two node physical 2012 R2 file server cluster that contains a few SMB shares on a single clustered disk. I'd like to enable shadow copies for this shared disk but want to store the shadow copy data on its own shared disk
as per shadow copy best practices (at least on non-clustered file servers).
I created a second cluster disk, assigned it to the same resources as the SMB clustered disk.
Now historically I've enabled shadow copies through computer management but I want to ensure the shadow copies are cluster aware so in the Failover Cluster Manager I open Storage | Disks and right click the SMB cluster disk and click the Shadow Copies tab.
From the tab I can Enable shadow copies, this sounds like what I'm looking for, unfortunately it does not give me an option to choose a disk/volume to store my shadow copy data, so this can't be right.
My next step was to connect computer management to the cluster virtual server name (NOCFS4) and through the System Tools | Shared Folders | All Tasks | Configure Shadow Copies it shows me the correct number of shares on the SMB cluster disk plus
I can see the Settings button for configuring the location and size limit for shadow copies, however once I tweak the shadow copy location and size settings, click Ok and click Enable to turn on the shadow copies I get a long pause and an error about
not being able to create a schedule. So it seems connecting to the cluster virtual object is not the answer either.
That leaves using computer management to connect to one of the physical server nodes of the cluster. When I open the shadow copy interface on the physical node I note that it shows a 0 for the number of shares it detects on the SMB clustered disk.
This doesn't surprise me since this interface isn't cluster resource aware.
So I'm stuck. Does anyone know the "Microsoft way" to enable shadow copies on a clustered disk while storing the shadow copy data on a second cluster disk both attached to the same cluster resource?