We’ve covered a creating a cluster and clustering a service and one other thing to configure in your cluster is failback policies.  These control if, how and when a failed resource is brought back online on the preferred owner.  As an example, say Node 1 in your file server cluster goes offline.  The resource will failover to Node 2.  But what happens when Node 1 comes back online?  By default, nothing, and this is to prevent a resource from bouncing back and forth between nodes as Node 1 goes on and offline due to a hardware issue, software updates, etc…

Again by default you will have to failback the resource manually as shown in the previous post on clustering a service.  If you wish to create an automated failback policy we have to do two things.  We can start by right-click on the service or application and select Properties.

First we must set a preferred owner for the service or application.

Next we can set the failback.  As you can see below the Prevent Failback radio button is selected by default.  You can change this to Allow Failback and then choose immediately or set a time frame during which the failback will occur.

Click OK and you are done!

For more information see:

TechNet Virtual Lab: Creating a Highly Available Infrastructure

TechNet Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Failover Clustering Lab

Failover Clustering Resource Center