Migrating Standalone File Sever to Clustered File Servers - The Easy Way?
We are currently working on a File server migration project. The plan is to migrate the current Window 2000 file server to a three nodes Windows Server 2003 Clustered file server. All the disks are on the SAN. Instead copy files or restore files from backup. We decided to re-map the SAN volumes to the new clusters, this will carry over all the data and NTFS permissions except – it won’t carry over the Shares as the share information stored in the OS registry.
My fellow MVP friend Jeremy Moskowitz helped me identified the registry key for the shares
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares\ and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares\Security
We tested it out and it is all happy except the shares will not fail over. Then we realized the fact that we need to create the File Share Resource through Cluster Administrator not Windows Explorer. Export/Import registry key is equivalent to creating shares through Windows Explorer. But creating hundreds of shares through Cluster Administrator even by script is daunting task and further more – it is not optimal configuration anyway!
Further digging point me to this KB256926 and our problem solved!
All we need to do as instructed in the above article
1, Create one single (root volume) cluster file share resource.
2, Grant everyone full control share-level permissions in cluster administrators.
3, Using the Parameters tab for the root cluster file share resource, click to select the Share all sub-directories check box.
4, Set appropriate NTFS permissions.
That is all we need to do for the new users folder created!