san storage swap and quorum and mstdc drives

  • Doing an emc storage switch from a 5300 to 5600 this weekend. I have move storage on stand-alone drives and done the swap of the drives and brought sql server up no issue. We have an active/passive 2008r2 cluster also to do. Kind of understand what will happen with the resources for data storage drives. My question is when switching out the quorum and msdtc drives how do you avoid breaking the cluster. Any field experiences or gotchas would be appreciated.

  • We moved from emc to NetApp last week which involved migrating the data between SANs via some device. We had two options around DTC and quorum:

    1. we could create a new disk on NetApp for each and then change the resources in the cluster. This would have involved several steps for each as we wanted to keep the current drive letter - so would have had to use a temporary letter on NetApp, change dtc and quorum to the temporary disk, drop the original disk from emc and then recreate the original drive letter on NetApp, basically rebuilding the quroum and DTC.

    2. We could sync the LUNs, take the quorum and DTC offline, switch the disk to NetApp and then bring the quorum and DTC back online.

    We chose option 2. There was no downtime of the cluster and no configuration changes of resources in the cluster as it was all done at the SAN level

  • does taking the quorum or dtc offline take down the cluster (sorry if 15 years never had to0

  • taking dtc offline does not affect the cluster.

    As for the disk witness it depends on your config.

    If you have only 2 nodes in the cluster and a disk witness, you take one node down and then take the disk witness offline then yes your cluster will stop.

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

  • In Win 2008r2 you can take the quorum offline and the cluster will stay up.

  • DNA_DBA (2/27/2015)


    In Win 2008r2 you can take the quorum offline and the cluster will stay up.

    depends on your config, generally 2008R2 is not as tolerant as windows 2012

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    "Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉

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