When a Cluster Validation Test is performed in an production environment with the configuration that uses Hyper-V with Cluster Shared Volumes chances are that the Storage tests will not finish successfully. The reason for conducting a Validation Test may be expanding the Failover Cluster with an additional node or for troubleshooting purposes.

The configuration which is tested is a configuration in which all disks and CSV are online. To let the Storage tests finish successfully there is a fairly simple solution. A disk or CSV must be offline. However, in a production environment this not always desirable. Think about what happens when one is brought offline containing the central SQL server. That’s right … people will not like you very much!!!

The solution is fortunately quite easy to implement. On the highly available storage a small volume with the size of 1GB needs to be created. This is then made available within the Failover Cluster in the usual way as CSV and then take the disk offline.

Start the Validation test again. The result is that the storage tests will complete successfully. In this way should other components not be properly configured or incompatible, they will not be pushed aside by the fact that no Storage test can be done!