Quorum Disk Best Practices

[Charles Blaisdell]

We are setting up a WIN2000 2 node cluster with 73 gig
pysical disks in the disk array. We will use the first 2
disks mirrored to put the quorum, However it was suggested
that the quarum mirror be partitioned so the rest of the
space can be used for the database logs. ie: 500 mb of the
mirror is drive letter Q and the rest of the space is
partitioned as L: and used for the logs. Is this OK?
Everything I have read says to leave the quorum physical
disks just for the quorum. What is MS offical Best
practice for this??

Thanks in advance
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Curtis Koenig [MSFT]]

Hi Charles,
The Cluster group should not be tied to any other group for the following
reasons-

According to: 168948 Information About the Cluster Group
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=168948

"The cluster group contains resources that are related to cluster
administration only and are considered core resources. If you add
additional resources to the group, you may not be able to administer the
cluster effectively. If resources in the cluster group fail, failover may
be triggered or you may not be able to administer the cluster effectively.
Therefore, Microsoft recommends that the quorum resource remain in a group
that has core resources only.

For best results and high availability of the cluster, do not add resources
to the cluster group. Instead, put additional resources in other groups as
appropriate."
---
280345 Quorum Drive Configuration Information
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=280345

"At a minimum, you must create at least one physical drive for the quorum
disk and a separate physical drive for data. Each drive must be formatted
as NTFS."

The quorum drive should also not be used for anything else, it should not
be partitioned and used for other purposes as this would neccessitate
resources in the cluster group. Cluster sees drives not partitions.

--
Curtis Koenig
Support Professional
Microsoft Clustering Technologies Support
MCSE, MCSES, CISSP

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