Additional Storage Requirements - HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Technical White Paper

Technical white paper | HP ProLiant DL980 G7 and P2000 G3 MSA Storage

Additional storage requirements

This HA solution also requires additional storage components for cluster functionality and transaction logging.
Quorum disk
Microsoft Windows clustering uses a voting method to ensure cluster quorum. Each cluster node, along with a cluster
quorum disk is used to establish cluster quorum. This solution utilizes the "Node and Disk Majority" quorum type in which
either both nodes, or 1 node and the quorum disk must be online for the cluster to continue. In addition to the Fast Track
storage, 1 RAID1 LUN is used for this quorum functionality.
Root disk
Since SQL Server system and database files will be shared between 2 systems in this configuration, these files can no longer
be housed or mounted to the C: drive. These files must reside on the SAN. For this we allocate an additional RAID1 LUN for
the volume mount points, and for the SQL Server system files.
SQL transaction logging
SQL Server Fast Track solutions utilize the "Simple" recovery model which provides for limited transaction logging and no
"point in time" database restoration. Transaction log files are truncated at each checkpoint. One of the requirements for SQL
clustering is that the databases run in "Full" recovery mode, in which transaction logs are kept until they are backed up, and
the database can be restored to a point in time using these logs. This method requires more disk space to store the logs and
potentially more disk bandwidth, since the system is writing more logs. For this solution we added two additional
transaction log LUNs to ensure that we have enough bandwidth and storage for the additional overhead.
Figure 8 below depicts the HA storage configuration for this solution.
Figure 8. HA Storage Overview
Additional details on setting up and configuring an HP Fast Track HA solution can be found in the following white paper
published on the HP website, http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-2740ENW
Table 12 in this document depicts a bill of materials for the DL980 G7 Fast Track HA solution.
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