SQL FCI Restore

[ppiman]

I have followed the instructions and used a protection group with Agents to protect a 2 node Windows 2016 server SQL 2016 FCI. The nodes are VMware VMs using shared storage and a shared quorum disk. I attempt to restore a cluster member using Bare metal recovery and the node boots and all data appears present, but I am unable to connect to the cluster manager. Ideally I would like to be able to restore one member of the cluster without shared disk to recover in an emergency situation. Is this possible? I am thinking perhaps the my quorum disk using shared storage may be the issue? Perhaps should I try using a file share witness?
I read some of the other posts on the forum, but I do not want to have to rely on the same shared storage during a DR situation. Any insight would be appreciated, thanks.

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community ppiman.

Please clarify, was your cluster backup was taken by Veeam B&R with failover cluster agent job? Thanks.

[ppiman]

Yes the backup was taken with a failover cluster agent job.

[Dima P.]

Ideally I would like to be able to restore one member of the cluster without shared disk to recover in an emergency situation. Is this possible?

Single node restore is fully supported (shared disk wont be restored in such case).

I attempt to restore a cluster member using Bare metal recovery and the node boots and all data appears present, but I am unable to connect to the cluster manager

Did you get any error or warning? Thanks.

[ppiman]

I was able to get this working. The solution was more of a clustering issue rather than a Veeam issue, although better documentation for specific scenarios would be helpful. I had to force the cluster online prior to being able to connect to the cluster manager using powershell.
Stop-Service -Name "ClusSvc"
Import-Module FailoverClusters
Start-ClusterNode -Name "ServerNode" -FixQuorum
Once connected to the cluster the shared disk with the SQL data was not working because the physical underlying disk had changed in the recovery process. I had to select the disk and Remove from SQL server. Doing this once makes it available again in the cluster and then I had to do the same and remove from SQL Server again which makes it a plain old disk which I could bring online in disk management. Once the disk was present and accessible the SQL role started and ran successfully. Hopefully this info might save someone some time in the future.