Robert Smit MVP Blog   Azure and Microsoft Windows Insider Server Cloud Blog

Lately I see a lot of issues with file sharing in clusters. Wrong connections ,DNS,Share mistakes etc.

This is a how to file share in Windows 2008R2 Clustering.

I assume that you have already a cluster if not see my blog on how to setup a Windows cluster ( R2 or 8 ).

How do we start : startup your failover cluster manager.

Next step Will be configure a service or application

Then we select the file server option and Remember this option needs to be available on every node that will hold the file share. If you do not have the Role selected go to roles and select the fileserver option along with the options you want. In my case I select almost all the options so extra options will show up in the configuration.

Now that we have selected the Role and we are giving this fileserver a netbios name and an static IP and a Disk that hold the files / shares/

Now that the file server is completed but the disk is not showing any shares. We are making shares on this disk along with several other options.

In the failover cluster manger go to the file server and right click add shared folder. this opens a new Wizard

Give your folder a share name and choose if you want to set extra permissions on NTFS.

You can do this also later.

During to role selection I did also select the DFS and NFS so in the screen are more options this way you can see what options there are if you use this role. remember there is a advanced button. most of you are forgetting this and ask them where to set this option. Well here :

In the advanced option you can set the max users and enable access based enumeration in the next screen you can select no caching for offline folders ( I don’t like this ) so I turn this off

and give access to admins or users. I do not have a DFS in place so I leave this screen empty

  \MVPCLUSTER02FS1file202

So then it is ready the files are in place , the share is created and I did use ABE

In the file server you can set a lot off extra options and also see the properties for this share.

On windows 8 it is almost the same as you can see in my next blog post.