S2D cluster demotion

The best method to remove an S2D cluster entirely is reinstalling Windows Server (or AzureStack HCI) from scratch.

Storage Spaces Direct is a deeply integrated essential part of the Windows Server operating system that touches nearly every aspect of it. That is why the best option to create a clean cluster is to install the operating system fresh and wipe the disks during the process.

Cleaning up your Active Directory, even after a proper cluster demotion, is also crucial. There may still be lots of remnants left that may need manual removal.

1. Start a new Windows Server installation.
2. Run diskpart during the installation wizard and perform disk clean for each disk in the server.
3. Finish the installation.
4. Install all the updates.
5. Create a new S2D cluster (using a different name and IP is recommended).

If you are up to build a hyper-converged solution, you may also be interested in replacing Storage Spaces Direct with Virtual SAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan. While having a similar feature set it does not require ReFS and offers much better performance and storage efficiency for smaller clusters.

Hi Mohamed, Thanks for your post. When taking an S2D server offline, it is not only taking away the compute and memory for that server but also a portion of the storage pool. Care must be taken to keep your data safe and ensure quick resumption of production-level readiness to your cluster. Visit Microsoft for the full description and latest information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/maintain-servers Key Steps to reboot servers:

1. Open PowerShell as Admin.
2. Check to make sure the virtual disks are healthy by running Get-VirtualDisk.
3. Run Suspend-ClusterNode -Drain to move the VMs to another node.
4. Run to cleanly put the storage into maintenance mode. At this point writes to this node’s storage are still active until step 5 has been completed. Get-StorageFaultDomain -type StorageScaleUnit | Where-Object {$_.FriendlyName -eq “<Node Name>”} | Enable-StorageMaintenanceMode
5. Run to verify the disks for the node are in maintenance mode. You should see “In Maintenance Mode, OK” under Operational Status. Foreach($Node in (Get-ClusterNode).Name){$Node;Get-StorageNode -Name $Node*|Get-PhysicalDisk -PhysicallyConnected}
6. Reboot server.
7. Once you’re ready to put the server back into production, open PowerShell as Admin.
8. Run to put the storage back into production. Get-StorageFaultDomain -type StorageScaleUnit | Where-Object {$_.FriendlyName -eq “<Node Name>”} | Disable-StorageMaintenanceMode
9. A storage job will initiate in the background to repair and resync the data. To check on the status, run (as Admin) Get-StorageJob If it returns to a command prompt that means there are no jobs running. Do not reboot the next node until all of the jobs have been completed.
10. Run Get-VirtualDisk to verify the virtual disks are healthy after storage jobs complete. Wait until steps 9 and 10 have been completed before live migrating VMs back to this node as storage jobs will consume system resources potentially affecting the response time of your applications.
11. Run Resume-ClusterNode -Failback Immediate to put the cluster node back into production to handle VM workloads. Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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