Clustering Question

  • Hi there - our infrastructure team has built a SQL cluster and has allocated the MSDTC and the Quorum to different resource groups but pointed at the same set of physical disks.

    Is this architecture ok? What impact could this have?

    Thanks

  • Both DTC and Quorum should have the drive as a dependency, so I'm not sure how they're pointing to the same disk if they're in different groups. If the dependency isn't set up, that's a huge issue right there since all online/offline/failover operations on a cluster depend heavily on having a proper dependency set up.

  • hmm ok I am looking at this more as I am unfamiliar with Failover Cluster Manager in Windows 2008.

    It seems we have 3 resource groups

    MSDTC

    SQL Instance 1

    SQL Instance 2

    I don't see the Quorum unless I click on Storage, and here it says Disk Witness in Quorum. So my question now is what resource group is the Quorum disk in? I had thought there would be a Cluster Group containing:

    Cluster IP Address

    Cluster Name

    Disk Q: (Quorum)

    Furthermore if the Quorum is a disk Q then how can it have a dependency on itself?

  • which quorum type did you specify when deploying the Windows 2008 cluster?

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

  • Hi sorry for the late reply I have been at SQLBits 7. The Quorum would have been the default at the time, the problem is I didn't do the install it was just passed to me.

  • Hi

    to find the quorum type in use do the following

    go into Failover cluster manager and in the left hand pane click on the cluster name. In the centre pane the panel will list the current quorum configuration type.

    When you first create a cluster using defaults it will set quorum configuration type to node majority (supports a single node in the cluster). As you add nodes you should re configure your quorum to support the number of nodes present.

    In a Windows 2008 cluster there is no longer a concept of a cluster group. To change the quorum type right click the cluster name in the left pane and select "More Actions" then select "Configure Cluster Quorum Settings". This will launch the reconfiguration wizard. You will eventually be presented with the quorum options

    Node majority

    Node and Disk majority

    Node and file share majority

    No majority disk only

    When selecting a disk based option you will be asked to confirm the disk resource to use, in my case i selected the disk in my DTC group that was already in use by the clustered DTC service. Be warned that if the DTC group goes offline so does your disk!

    Check out technet for more info on the quorum configurations under Windows 2008!

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

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