Hello,
I've seen similar questions posted on here before however I have yet to find a solution that worked for us so I'm adding my process in hopes someone can point out where I went wrong.
The problem: After failover, shadow copies are only available for a short time on the secondary server. Before the task to create new shadow copies happens the shadow copies are deleted. Failing back shows them missing on the primary server as well when this happens.
We have a 2 node (hereafter server1 and server2) cluster with a quorum disk. There are 8 disk resources which are mapped to the cluster via iScsi. 4 of these disks are setup as storage and the other 4 are currently set up as shadow copy volumes for their respective storage volume.
Previously we weren't using separate shadow copy volumes and seeing the same issue described in the topic title. I followed two other topics on here that seemed close and then setup the separate shadow copy volumes however it has yet to alleviate the issue. These are the two other topics :
Topic 1: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/ba0d2568-53ac-4523-a49e-4e453d14627f/failover-cluster-server-file-server-role-is-clustered-shadow-copies-do-not-seem-to-travel-to?forum=winserverClustering
Topic 2: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/c884c31b-a50e-4c9d-96f3-119e347a61e8/shadow-copies-missing-after-failover-on-2008-r2-cluster
After reading both of those topics I did the following:
1) Add the 4 new volumes to the cluster for shadow copies
2) Made each storage volume dependent on it's shadow copy volume in FCM
3) Went to the currently active node directly and opened up "My Computer", I then went to the properties of each storage volume and set up shadow copies to go to the respective shadow copy volume drive letter with correct size for spacing, etc.
4) I then went back to FCM and right clicked on the corresponding storage volume and choose "Configure Shadow Copy" and set the schedule for 12:00 noon and 5:00 PM.
5) I noticed that on the nodes the task was created and that the task would failover between the nodes and appeared correct.
6) Everything appears to failover correctly, all volumes come up, drive letters are same, shadow copy storage settings are the same, and 4 scheduled tasks for shadow copy appear on the current node after failover.
Thinking everything was setup according to best practice I did some testing by changing file contents throughout the day making sure that previous versions were created as scheduled on server1. I then rebooted Server1 to simulate failure. Server2 picked up the role within about 10 seconds and files were avaiable. I checked and I could still see previous versions for the files after failover that were created on server1. Unfortunately that didn't last as the next day before noon I was going to make more changes to files to ensure that not only could we see the shadow copies that were created when Server1 owned the file server role but also that the copies created on Server2 would be seen on failback. I was disappointed to discover that the shadow copies were all gone and failing back didn't produce them either.
Does anyone have any insight into this issue? I must be missing a switch somewhere or perhaps this isn't even possible with our cluster type based on this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779378%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
Now here's an interesting part, shadow copies on 1 of our 4 volumes have been retained from both nodes through the testing, but I can't figure out what makes it different though I do suspect that perhaps the "Disk#s" in computer management / disk management perhaps need to be the same between servers? For example, on server 1 the disk #s for cluster volume 1 might be "Disk4" but on server 2 the same volume might be called "Disk7", however I think that operations like this and shadow copy are based on the disk GUID and perhaps this shouldn't matter.
Edit, checked on the disk numbers, I see no correlation between what I'm seeing in shadow copy and what is happening to the numbers. All other items, quotas, etc fail and work correctly despite these diffs:
-------------------------Disk Numbers on Server 1:
-------------------------
Format: "shadow/storerelationvolume = Disk Number"
aHome storage1 = 16
aShared storage2 = 09
sHome storage3 = 01
sShared storage4 = 04
aHome shadow1 = 10
aShared shadow2 = 11
sHome shadow3 = 02
sShared shadow4 = 05
-------------------------
Disk numbers on Server 2:
-------------------------
aHome storage1 = 16 (SAME)
aShared storage2 = 04 (DIFF)
sHome storage3 = 05 (DIFF)
sShared storage4 = 08 (DIFF)
aHome shadow1 = 10 (SAME)
aShared shadow2 = 11 (SAME)
sHome shadow3 = 06 (DIFF)
sShared shadow4 = 09 (DIFF)
Thanks in advance for your assistance/guidance on this matter!