Quorum Disk Question.

We will be setting up a Windows 2000 SQL server on a two node 2003 Cluster
connected to an HP SAN.
Reading through the whitepapers and watching the webcast on how to setup
everything says to keep the data files on a seperate disk from the quorum
drive.
This will not be a problem, however we currently run 2 two node file and
print clusters one 2000 and one 2003 where we have the quorum drive the same
as the shared data and the cluster works fine and failsover correctly.
Question:
Why is it nessary or even best practice to seperate the quroum from the
data? I have searched high and low for an ansewer but the only thing I can
find is do not do it on SQL.
That is because if the controlling node cannot access the quorum drive in a
timely fashion, it will fail over to the other node. If this happens too
often, 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.
Geoff N. Hiten
Senior Database Administrator
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
"DRay" <DavidRay@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68868872-9EF0-4317-96A0-825B6F76C387@.microsoft.com...
> We will be setting up a Windows 2000 SQL server on a two node 2003 Cluster
> connected to an HP SAN.
> Reading through the whitepapers and watching the webcast on how to setup
> everything says to keep the data files on a seperate disk from the quorum
> drive.
> This will not be a problem, however we currently run 2 two node file and
> print clusters one 2000 and one 2003 where we have the quorum drive the
> same
> as the shared data and the cluster works fine and failsover correctly.
> Question:
> Why is it nessary or even best practice to seperate the quroum from the
> data? I have searched high and low for an ansewer but the only thing I can
> find is do not do it on SQL.
|||Thank you sir that answers my question.
David Ray
Systems Administrator
"Geoff N. Hiten" wrote:

> That is because if the controlling node cannot access the quorum drive in a
> timely fashion, it will fail over to the other node. If this happens too
> often, 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.
> --
> Geoff N. Hiten
> Senior Database Administrator
> Microsoft SQL Server MVP
>
> "DRay" <DavidRay@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:68868872-9EF0-4317-96A0-825B6F76C387@.microsoft.com...
>
>