The World According to Mitch

Three years ago I wrote an article about cleaning up nodes of clusters that had been corrupted and destroyed (See Cluster Issues… how to clean out cluster nodes from destroyed clusters). 

Unfortunately the cluster command has been deprecated in Windows Server 2012 R2, so we need to go to PowerShell… which frankly is where we should be going anyways!

PS C:\> Clear-ClusterNode –Cluster Toronto –Force

In this example we had a cluster named Toronto that is no longer accessible.  Unfortunately one of the nodes was off-line when the cluster was destroyed, so it didn’t ‘get the message.’  As such, when we try later to join it to a new cluster we get an error that the server is already a node in another cluster.

The cmdlet only takes a minute to run, and when you do run it you are all set… you will immediately be able to join it to another cluster.

For the fun of it, I have not figured out yet how to (natively) run this cmdlet against a remote server, so you can either do it by connecting to each server or…

Invoke-Command –ComputerName Server1 –ScriptBlock {Clear-ClusterNode –Cluster Toronto –Force}

I covered this option in a previous article (Do IT Remotely) which shows how to run cmdlets (or any script) against a remote server.

No go forth and script!