Monday, March 2, 2009

Moving quorum/MSDTC drive in a SQL server cluster environment

Moving quorum/MSDTC drive in a SQL server cluster environment
22 July from external source
Moving a Cluster to a New SAN
A fairly common scenario for a cluster administrator is to move a cluster from one SAN to another as SAN equipment is replaced with newer/faster SANs or the old SAN's lease is up and a new one is being brought in.
The easiest way that I have found to do this is to use these steps (this is from memory, let me know if I missed one or two):
Super High Level Steps:

1. Put the new array in the same fabric as the existing array
2. Create new LUNs on the new array and make sure they are visible to the nodes
3. Map the new LUNs to the old drive letters
4. Copy data from the old drive to the new drive
5. Move quorum and MSDTC

Slightly More Detailed Steps:

1. Carve the new LUNs on the new array
2. Add the new array and its LUNs to the same switch as the existing array
3. Configure the LUN masking on the switch to expose the new LUNs to NodeA and NodeB
4. Use the disk management tools in Windows to rescan the drives
5. Use the active node to partition and format the disks
6. Use Cluster Administrtor to create the new physical disk resources and put them into their proper cluster groups
7. Move the Quorum using the GUI to a temp location
1. In Cluster Administrator, right click the cluster name
2. Select Properties
3. Select the Quorum tab
4. Use the drop down box to select a temp location for the quorum
8. Delete the existing MSDTC folder (if any)
1. Stop the MSDTC resource
2. Copy the MSDTC folder from Q: to the final quorum disk target location
3. Stop the Q: resource (remember, the quorum isn't there anymore)
4. Delete the MSDTC resource
9. Move the quorum to its final location
1. Go into disk management and change the Q: name to another letter
2. Use disk management and name the final quorum drive to Q:
3. Repeat steps 1-4 to move the quorum to its final destination
10. Recreate the MSDTC resource
1. Create a new MSDTC resource with the clustername network name resource and the new Q: as dependencies
2. Bring the MSDTC resource online
11. Stop the cluster service and the application cluster groups (you can just stop the application resources if you want to move app data an app at a time)
12. Move the data from the old disks to the new ones
13. Re-letter the old disks to something outside the current range, but do not remove them yet - you might need to use them in your back out plan
14. Re-letter the new disks to the same drive letter as the old ones (no, you do not have to worry about disk signatures as applications don't understand disk signatures and don't care about anything other than drive letters)
15. Verify the dependencies and update them as needed
16. Restart the cluster service
17. Make sure the new drive letters and disk resources are showing up properly in cluster administrator
18. Bring everything back online

Again, these are basic steps. Some of the individual steps will require lots of work. I have done this now several times and am very happy with the results.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;280353

Fom: http://msmvps.com/blogs/clusterhelp/archive/2005/08/05/moving-a-cluster-to-a-new-san-original-posted-jul-22-2005.aspx

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Am I wrong, or is this just a repost of the information from Russ Kaufmann's blog back in July 2005?

http://russkaufmann.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!9628511B4C1D269C!303.entry


Good information, but seems a little suspect (skeezy, even?) not giving credit where credit is due.

George Wen said...

Hi Adams,

yes, this is a repost from other source, as you can see from my other posts, most of them will have source links attached, I probably missed out this one.

the original source should probably be at http://msmvps.com/blogs/clusterhelp/archive/2005/08/05/moving-a-cluster-to-a-new-san-original-posted-jul-22-2005.aspx

Anonymous said...

I guess you may want to place a facebook button to your website. Just marked down the blog, but I must do this by hand. Simply my advice.

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