should the quorum disk be a physical disk or majority node set?

Question

Hello,

   I am trying to setup a test cluster and am having an issue. When I try to create the resource of a physical disk it takes both the drive e: and drive q: and doesn't seperate them into two physical disks as resources. This means when I try to associate the quorum disk it links the to physcial disk resource of drive e and q. Then when I try to install SQL2k5 I get the warning about installing SQL on the quorum disk. Am I missing something? Is there a way to seperate e and q onto two physical disk resources so I can specifically associate the quorum to q and the sql to e or should I be setting the quorum disk to a majority node set? Thanks in advance.

John

 

Answer 1

When MSCS looks at disks as resources, they deal with the DISK.  Not the volume.  This is because the low-level SCSI protocols attach/reserve at the physical disk level, not at the volume level.  So, if E: and Q: are partitions of the same physical disk, this is expected behavior because you cannot independantly move them from node to node.

If, on the other hand, E: and Q: are on completely separate spindles, there's something else going on.

Answer 2

Kevin,

   Thanks for the reply. In general terms on the SAN we have two arrays, should one be for the quorum and the other for the data files? If so where should put the logs? Or should the SAN have three arrays?

Answer 3

Generally, SAN arrays expose storage in LUNs.  A SAN LUN is the equivalent in cluster terms of a physical disk.  You certainly don't need to dedicate a whole array to the quorum!