SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive
Quorum & MSDTC Cluster Questions
We are trying to setup a Windows Server 2003 Cluster with 2 systems and a DAV. We intend to install SQL 2005 on this Cluster. We purchased a DAV with 3 physical disk arrays as follows. 73GB RAID 1 (our plan is to use this to store sql transaction logs)146GB RAID 1 (sql backups, temp database & other temp files)
420GB RAID 10 (sql databases) Now as we are setting all this up we find out we need a shared physical drive on the DAV to store the Quorom. It is my understanding we cannot partition the physical drives and use one of the partitions to store the Quorum because when you create the resource for the Quorum the resource is the phsyical disk not the partition. So my question is, is it in our best interest to buy a seperate physical disk for the Quorom? My next question is, with regards to the MSDTC, is it in our best interest to buy a seperate physical disk for the MSDTC or can we store it on the 146GB RAID 1 and still use the drive for its original purpose? Any guidance is much appreciated. – Nick
There are few changes to made to usage of Quorum & MSDTC from Windows 2003 onwards, which are good. Due to the fact if the controlling node cannot access the quorum drive in a timely fashion, it will fail over to the other node. If this happens for next 3 times then the entire cluster will go offline. With Windows 2003, Microsoft changed its recommendations for MSDTC from allowing it on the quorum disk to advising it be put on a separate set of physical disks. This is after observing some configurations where very high DTC activity created timeout issues that did force some clusters offline. Satya SKJ
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Contributing Editor & Forums Moderator
http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
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