Adding Shared drive in a Windows 2003 Cluster

[Sheldon Smith]

Looking through the various TechNet notes and KBs, at least for Windows 2003 *prior* to adding Service Pack 1, it is necessary to shut down all nodes but one when adding a new drive.

After the initial signing, formatting and assigning of a new drive letter, does the first node need to be shut down while setting up the drive on each of the remaining nodes? (This would be prior to creating a storage resource for the drive)

Microsoft states the Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 adds (a lot of) new functionality to Windows clusters. Is it still necessary to shut down all but one node and bring up each node exclusively to set up a cluster shared drive and resource with SP1?

[Rune J. Winje · Accepted solution]

Before the cluster has been formed this is a good procedure to follow - even if i think it might be redundant after Windows 2000.

After the cluster has been formed there should be no problem to add new shared disks via first disk manager (format and give write disk signature) and then via cluster admin. After you have added a new disk I would recommend failing over the disk to the other node via "Move Group" (so put the disk in it's own group first). Then fail it back. This ensures all nodes have the same cluster registry info and that failover actually works...

That being said, even with SP1 there are numerous disk related (storport.sys, clusdisk.sys, disk signature etc) and cluster related hotfixes. So you should either go for the hotfixes below or for SP2 (just out now per 13.th march).

"Recommended hotfixes for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1- based server clusters"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923830/en-us

I do NOT recommend running Windows 2003 without SP1 or even withot the above hotfixes - and in fact support for Windows 2003 without SP1 (RTM) will retire 10-Apr-2007.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps#Windows

From a practical point of view it is also too many bugs with the RTM version - if you still run that and haven't had problems with your cluster you are lucky...


Cheers,
Rune

[Sheldon Smith]

Thanks