Sometimes during maintenance or diagnosis that involves a service or application in a failover cluster, you might need to bring that service or application online or take it offline. Bringing an application online or taking it offline does not trigger failover, although the Cluster service handles the process in an orderly fashion. For example, if a particular disk is required by a particular clustered application, the Cluster service ensures that the disk is available before the application starts.

For information about related actions, such as pausing a cluster node, see Managing a Failover Cluster.

Membership in the local Administrators group on each clustered server, or equivalent, is the minimum required to complete this procedure. Also, the account you use must be a domain account. Review details about using the appropriate accounts and group memberships at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=83477.

To bring a clustered service or application online or take it offline

  1. In the Failover Cluster Manager snap-in, if the cluster you want to manage is not displayed, in the console tree, right-click Failover Cluster Manager, click Manage a Cluster, and then select or specify the cluster you want.

  2. If the console tree is collapsed, expand the tree under the cluster that you want to manage.

  3. Under Services and Applications, expand the console tree.

  4. Check the status of the service or application that you want to bring online or take offline by clicking the service or application and viewing the Status column (in the center pane).

  5. Right-click the service or application that you want to bring online or take offline.

  6. Click the appropriate command: Bring this service or application online or Take this service or application offline.

Additional considerations

  • You can also perform the task described in this procedure by using Windows PowerShell. For more information about using Windows PowerShell for failover clusters, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=135119 and http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=135120.

  • To open the failover cluster snap-in, click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Failover Cluster Manager. If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Yes.

  • Note that in a clustered file server, shared folders are associated with a File Server resource. When you bring that resource online or take it offline, all shared folders in the resource go offline or online at the same time. You cannot change the online or offline status of one of the shared folders without affecting all of the shared folders in the File Server resource.

Additional references

  • Understanding Backup and Recovery Basics for a Failover Cluster
  • Live Migrate, Quick Migrate, or Move a Virtual Machine from Node to Node