While working on a case few days ago, I faced this question by customer and i found it interesting to blog about. (Today I found this in forum so finalizing and posting it). Here is the question.

I have created two node windows cluster. All disk are available in “storage” but I don’t see any option to do manual failover unless they are part of some group. How can I test if failover is working fine for disks without shutting down the node or adding them to a group.

Here is the screenshot to explain the problem better. As you can see that U and W are not part of any group defined under “Services and Applications”. So by default they are the part of “Available Storage” group.

And indeed there is no option in UI to do failover of those disks.

I spend sometime with windows team and I was able to find the answer. so here it goes.
This can only be done by command line. We need to use cluster.exe command to achieve this.

Cluster Group “Available Storage” /Move:NodeName

In above command NodeName is optional. If you have two nodes, it would move storage automatically to other node.

Hope this would help someone in the world!

Cheers,
Balmukund Lakhani
Twitter @blakhani