Q. Why doesn't the Get-Cluster Windows PowerShell cmdlet work on my cluster nodes?

Back in a previous question, I discussed how to use PowerShell to enumerate and modify some of the cluster-specific settings for your Hyper-V Windows Failover Cluster. In that answer, I showed you how to use the Get-Cluster command piped to Format-List (which was aliased to ft) to view those properties. But if you ran off to your own cluster to run this command, you probably quickly discovered that this cmdlet didn't work. Why not?

The cmdlets that are associated with Windows Failover Clustering are part of a module called FailoverClusters. This module isn't loaded by default when you first launch PowerShell, even from the console of your cluster nodes. To load this cmdlet and enable the use of cmdlets such as Get-Cluster, first run

Import-Module FailoverClusters

If, down the road, you forget the exact name of this module, you can always get a listing of the available modules using

Get-Module -ListAvailable

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