Hello, my name is East, and I’m an Escalation Engineer on the Microsoft Platform Global Escalation Services team. Here are some tips for those wanting to review dumps from Cluster Administrator (Cluadmin.exe), the GUI version of cluster.exe that allows management of your cluster environment. Historically there were more Cluadmin hangs in Windows 2000 Cluster server than Windows 2003 Cluster server so the volume of these dumps submitted to my group has dropped significantly. People have submitted complete memory dumps thinking the entire Cluster server was hung when it turned out to be a Cluadmin hang. It’s important to determine what is really hung when troubleshooting these types of problems.

So what causes Cluadmin to hang? In most cases a resource is working to come online, or a remote connection is misbehaving which results in the hang. Cluadmin dumps are not as helpful in revealing why a resource is misbehaving in your Cluster environment, when compared to dumping the cluster service and resrcmon. In most cases the cluster log can help you narrow down a problematic resource that’s holding Cluadmin up. Later I will show how to find the possible resource that caused a Cluster Administrator hang by using the debugger.