Troubleshooting Windows Failover Cluster Disk Resource Failures and Failover Issues.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

After you disable the paths to all available virtual disks, including boot disks and cluster disks, in an active Windows Server 2008/2012 cluster node, the cluster resources fail or go offline.

WSFC cluster disk resources failed or went offline, but cluster node failover did not occur.

 

 

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

If all paths go offline or connectivity to the LUNs from the storage array is lost for the RDM/VMDK disks of the VM running on the WSFC, and the 'returnNoConnectDuringAPD' parameter is set to false, failover from the active cluster node to the peer node will not occur.

Resolution

 

1. Modify advanced settings for a virtual SCSI controller hosting the boot device. Add the following advanced settings to the VMs node:

    

       scsiX.returnNoConnectDuringAPD = "TRUE" 

       scsiX.returnBusyOnNoConnectStatus = "FALSE" 

   Where X is the boot device SCSI bus controller ID number. By default, X is set to 0.

   
   
   
   Note: Here is the document for more details regarding Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) with shared disks on VMware vSphere 7.x: Guidelines for supported configurations.
   
   
   scsiX.returnNoConnectDuringAPD = "TRUE" - This setting is specifically designed for WSFC environments where multiple virtual machines share storage. It helps ensure that the cluster behaves predictably during storage-related failures or when one node is experiencing an APD state. When configuring WSFC with vSphere, it's generally recommended to use this setting, especially if you are using clustered VMDKs or RDM physical mode.