The Storage Foundation for Windows High Availability (SFW HA) or Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) engine won't start. The error can be identified by:
1) performing "hacf -verify <conf_dir>" from the command prompt.
where <conf_dir> refers to the directory where the main.cf for the cluster is located.
2) performing "hasys -state" from the command prompt, the output will show the cluster is in STALE_ADMIN_WAIT state.
3) Check hacf-err_A.txt log
Error information from step (1) and (3) may show similar errors to "VCS WARNING V-16-1-12021 Error - syntax error (") in file .\main.cf:8"
In this case, there is a syntax error relating to the quotation mark (") in line 8.
This error can arise if the VCS host name starts with a non character. Check main.cf, if one node hostname starts with a number, then VCS automatically adds double quotation marks around it. For example, if the hostname is 123abc, VCS automatically changes that to "123abc" in main.cf
NOTE: Its there are a number of possibilities for a syntax error, review the error message for exact text if this message is received to help locate the source.
Workaround
One workaround is to manually modify main.cf and remove all double quotation marks around the hostname, and use command "hasys -force 123abc" to start VCS forcibly, VCS will be able to start successfully, but after the cluster starts, the host name will be modified to include the quotation marks again.
Final solution should be changing the hostname to start with character, for example, change hostname from 123abc to a123abc.
