Windows 2003 Quorum Disk on a MSA1500cs

[Steve Errotabere]

I will be installing a Windows 2003 Cluster on 2 Bl20p's with a MSA1500cs. The MSA will have 10 250gb SATA drives. Since these are 250M drives, it doesnt make sense to dedicate 2 drives for a 500M Quorum. What is the best practice on configuring a 500M LUN for the Quorum? Should I create the Quorum LUN on a array that will have databases or log files (it will be running Exchange)? Thanks for any info

[Jefferson Humber]

Steve,

It depends how the rest of your array will be configured.

Since you can have multiple LUN'S across the same physical spindles with differing RAID levels, just carve one out across an existing array.

You may want to use a different disk array (group) though. Personally I would put the quorum disk in the same group as the system disk. I have done similar under OpenVMS on an MSA1000, and it has worked flawlessly for me.

I would try and balance the loading across the spindles the best you can though.

Jeff

[Steve Errotabere]

Thanks for the quick reply Jeff;

My mistake on my original post, these are 250GB not MB drives :)

"You may want to use a different disk array (group) though. Personally I would put the quorum disk in the same group as the system disk."

The OS will be booting off the local disks on the blades not the MSA.

More and likely the MSA will have 3 arrays. 1 or 2 for the Exchange cluster databases/logs and 1 for the file server cluster. I am thinking on putting the Quorum on one of the arrays that will have the least disk I/O. I dont think the customer will want to dedicate an array for the 500Mb quorum LUN since the drives are 250Gb drives.

[Richard Perez · Accepted solution]

Steve
from a performance view, the Quorum disk has very little access then there's no matter if you share an array between logfiles and Quorum.

From a reliability view, place it on a RAID1 or 5 array

[Ruslan]

Totally agree with Richard. Place Quorum on any array with RAID 1,5,ADG level, NOT RAID 0

[Steve Errotabere]

Thanks for the information everyone!