I’ve been running Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster for about a year and it’s been stable up until now. Recently, I encountered an issue where Live migration of VMs failed across all hosts in the cluster. In addition, the Failover Cluster Manager started displaying the following error:

Cluster network name resource ‘Cluster Name’ failed registration of one or more associated DNS name(s) for the following reason:
The handle is invalid. Select your cluster name on the top left pane of the Failover Cluster Manager.

The error was obviously related to DNS in some way. I still couldn’t figure out the cause though. After digging around for a while, I came up with the following steps that have so far helped me resolve the problem.

Open the Failover Cluster Manager Console.

In the center panel, go down to “Cluster Core Resources”.

Right-click your Cluster name and select the “More actions” drop down option.

I selected the “Simulate Failure” option.

After the Cluster Object goes offline, right-click the Cluster Name again, “More actions” and select “Repair”.

Still the DNS status was still “Invalid” .
For a second time, I went ahead and did a right-click on the Cluster name object again.

This time I selected the “Take Offline” option.

After the Cluster Object went offline, I did a right-click on the Cluster Name, “More actions” and selected the “Repair” option.

This time, the DNS status changed to “OK” after the Cluster name “Repair” action.

So far, these steps seem to resolve the error without disrupting any Virtual Machine operations. I plan to upgrade to WS 2012 R2 and hopefully will not have to deal with this. Hopefully, these steps help spare someone a lot of headache :).