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How to clear Cluster Validation failures

Rob Leadbeater 20 Reputation points
2026-03-24T10:06:31.3933333+00:00

I have a 3 node WIndows Server 2025 cluster, which is reporting a Critical failure due to previous issues in its Validation Reports.

If I re-run Test-Cluster, I get a few warnings, but there are no longer any failures listed.

Yet this error keeps coming up in the Dashboard view of the cluster in WAC:

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I've tried removing the previous Validation Reports, but that hasn't helped.

The only valid warning I can see is for S2D Pool Usage (PoolCapacityThresholdExceeded).

Any suggestions as to how to reset the ValidationReport health?

Cheers,

Rob

Windows for business | Windows Server | Storage high availability | Other
Answer accepted by question author
  1. Domic Vo 19,030 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2026-03-24T11:04:05.5433333+00:00

    Hello Rob,

    What you are seeing is a known quirk in how Windows Admin Center surfaces cluster health. The “Critical failure due to previous issues in Validation Reports” flag is not dynamically cleared once you re‑run Test-Cluster and obtain only warnings. WAC caches the last failure state and continues to display it until the cluster health summary is reset. Removing the validation report files manually does not change the cluster’s internal health state because the information is stored in the cluster database and surfaced through the ClusterValidation resource.

    The only way to reset the health status is to run a full validation again and allow the results to overwrite the previous failure state. However, if the validation still produces warnings, WAC will continue to show degraded health even though no failures are present. This is by design: warnings are treated as non‑blocking but still propagate into the dashboard view. The “Critical” flag persists if any prior run contained failures, and WAC does not downgrade it automatically.

    In your case, the only active warning is PoolCapacityThresholdExceeded from Storage Spaces Direct. That warning is valid and will keep the cluster flagged in WAC until the pool usage drops below the configured threshold. You can confirm this by checking Get-ClusterHealthReport and reviewing the ClusterHealthEvents entries.

    There is no supported method to clear the “Critical” status other than resolving the underlying warning or waiting for Microsoft to adjust WAC’s handling of historical validation results. If you want to verify that the cluster is otherwise healthy, rely on Test-Cluster and Get-ClusterLog rather than the WAC dashboard. The dashboard is conservative and will continue to show red until the S2D pool usage warning is addressed.

    So in short: the cluster health state is not reset by deleting reports, and WAC will continue to show critical until the S2D pool usage warning is resolved. The cluster itself is healthy if Test-Cluster shows no failures.

    I hope you've found something useful here. If it helps you get more insight into the issue, it's appreciated to accept the answer. Should you have more questions, feel free to leave a message. Have a nice day!

    Domic Vo.

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  1. Q&A Assist
    2026-03-24T10:06:54.8033333+00:00
    AI generated content. This question contains an answer created with AI from Q&A Assist. Learn more

    Cluster health and supportability are based on the latest successful validation run, not on old reports. To clear the failure status, ensure that:

    1. All current validation tests complete without failures (only warnings are acceptable for a supported configuration).
      • Run validation again from Failover Cluster Manager: Failover Cluster Management → Management → Validate a Configuration and complete all tests, or use Test-Cluster in PowerShell.
      • After the run, open the Summary page and confirm that there are no red failure icons; only green checks and (optionally) yellow warnings.
    2. Any real failures reported in the latest run are corrected before considering the cluster healthy.
      • For each failed test in the report, select it and follow the guidance in the Analyze validation results section. For example, storage failures typically require working with the storage vendor; network/IP failures require network configuration fixes.
      • After fixing, rerun validation until all tests pass or only warnings remain.
    3. Use the latest validation report as the health baseline.
      • The supported state is defined as: “all tests are required to run and complete without failures.” Once that condition is met, the cluster is considered supported, regardless of older reports.
      • Windows Admin Center may still surface older failure reports as historical alerts, but they do not affect supportability once a clean validation has been achieved.

    If Windows Admin Center continues to show a critical alert even though the latest validation report has no failures, rely on the current validation report in C:\Windows\Cluster\Reports as the authoritative source for health and supportability. The alert in WAC reflects past failures and will not change cluster support status as long as the most recent validation run is clean.

    References:

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