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How to provision shares remotely in a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster

Article ID: 947047 - View products that this article applies to.

INTRODUCTION

You can use the Failover Cluster Management snap-in, the Share and Storage Management snap-in, or Windows Explorer to provision shares in a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster. You can use Administrative Tools to access the Share and Storage Management snap-in. Or, you can run the Manage Shares and Storage action in the Failover Cluster Management snap-in to provision shares. You can also use the Add a shared folder action to provision shares from the Failover Cluster Management snap-in.

MORE INFORMATION

No error occurs if you provision a share by using the user interface (UI) tools that are described in the "Introduction" section and if the highly available service or the application group is local to the cluster node.

However, an error occurs if you try to provision a share remotely and if the highly available service or the application group is not local to the cluster node. You may receive the following error message:

<Client_Access_Point_Name>: Virtual Disk Service initialization failed. It is possible that the connection is blocked by Windows firewall. A VDS (Virtual Disk Service) error occurred while performing the requested operation.

To enable the provision shares functionality remotely, modify Windows Firewall on all nodes in the cluster. To do this, follow these steps:

Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Windows Firewall.
Click Change settings.
Click the Exception tab, click to select the Remote Volume Management check box.
Click OK.