Basic Cluster Administration tasks through command prompt/PowerShell2.0

There are few tasks(moving Quorum disk/restarting Cluster Service on all nodes) which you can’t perform through Cluster Administrator –GUI but you can perform through command line\Powershell.

Following are the basic operations which we perform on regular basis,  below commands works on Windows2003/2008/R2

Note:

we need to import failovercluster module in PowerShell2.0 before we execute any cluster related command otherwise it throws error. 

To import that module run following command in Powershell2.0 prompt.( Powershell version1.0 doesn’t have feature to import modules)

import-module failoverclusters

These commands are very helpful in case if you are unable to open cluster administrator –GUI.

Task	Command Prompt	PowerShell
Move cluster group/Quorum disk	cluster group "cluster group" /move:LABLWLA04B	Move-ClusterGroup "Cluster Group" -Node LABLWLA04B
Move instance INS401 to LABLWLA04B node	cluster group "INS401" /move:LABLWLA04B	Move-ClusterGroup INS401 -Node LABLWLA04B
Bring down INS401 instance	cluster group " INS401" /Off	Stop-ClusterGroup INS401
Bring up  INS401 instance	cluster group " INS401" /On	Start-ClusterGroup INS401

There lot of other commands available in both the prompts, if you want to explore…. here are the links: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee461009.aspx , http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2010/09/25/mapping-cluster-exe-commands-to-windows-powershell-cmdlets-for-failover-clusters-extended-edition.aspx