How to Move the Quorum (Witness) Disk to Another Node in a Failover Cluster

I have recently had issues with a Server 2008 Failover Cluster where one node was rebooted, then wouldn't join the cluster again, causing issues. All clustered services were manually failed over to the second node before reboot, but the witness (or quorum) disk was still owned by the first node. Usually on a reboot the second node would have taken ownership of this.

For some reason this process didn't happen so when Node 1 came back up, it thought Node 2 owned the cluster and tried to join. Node 2 rejected this request saying Node 1 owned the cluster - at this point, Node 1 tried to start a new cluster but wasn't able to take the witness disk away from Node 2, which currently owned that resource.

After much deliberation, we finally rebooted both nodes and this time the cluster was gracefully established.

Anyway, lesson learned and from now on I will be manually failing over the witness disk if it is currently owned by a node I am about to restart.

To find which cluster node currently owns a witness disk, you can check in Failover Cluster Manager to see which node owns the "Disk Witness in Quorum".

You can also open a command prompt and enter the command

cluster group

This will list all cluster resources  as follows :

Listing status for all available resource groups:

Group                Node            Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group        NODE1 Online
Available Storage    NODE1 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE1)  NODE2 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE6)  NODE1 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE3)  NODE1 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE4)  NODE1 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE7)  NODE1 Online
SQL Server (INSTANCE5)  NODE1 Online

From this, you can see the the "Cluster Group" is currently owned by NODE1 - the quorum disk resides in this group. To move it to the other node, you can enter the command

cluster group "Cluster Group" /move

You would then see something like

Moving resource group 'Cluster Group'...

Group                Node            Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group        NODE2 Online

If you had more than 2 nodes in the cluster, you could choose a specific node as follows

cluster group "Cluster Group" /moveto:node4

Source: http://www.greytrust.com