This section describes the general process for ASR recoveries with Microsoft Cluster. Refer to your backup and recovery application documentation and related Microsoft articles for further information.

There are two types of recoveries that may occur within a Microsoft Cluster set-up, node restore and cluster restore.

A node restore is necessary when a single node of a cluster has failed. In this case, the shared disks failover to another node, but the local node needs to be recovered using the ASR backup. The recovery process is similar to the general process previously described, the system configuration recreated except that the disks that failed over to another node are inaccessible to the local node during the ASR Recovery. After the ASR Recovery process is complete, the node should restart and automatically join the cluster.

A cluster restore is necessary when a cluster with a single node running fails. In this case, since there is no node available for failover, the disk containing the quorum information needs to be restored. The quorum information is saved during the ASR Backup process, but is not automatically copied to the quorum disk during the ASR Recovery process. Instead the quorum information must be manually restored using the resource kit utility clustrest.exe. Following this, a system restart should be forced. The single node cluster boots and begins operating properly.