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Failover Clustering (Adding new Drive Letter)

  • November 10, 2005 at 8:59 am

    #111181

    Most of our production applications run on two node clusters. Last week, our sys admin added a new volume / drive letter to the SAN for this particular cluster.  I can see the new drive when connecting via Terminal Services to the Virtual node, and each Individual nodes. I am unable to see the new drive in Enterprise Manager, when I attempt to create a new database.

    In the Cluster Administrator, everything looks fine….I added a new resource "Physical Disk", verified the owning nodes, I can see the new drive letter, as an active resource, it belongs to the correct group, is on line etc.

    I have failed-over the node a couple of times successfully, have re-started sql server service a couple of times, and have even re-booted each node.

    For what ever reason, I still can not see the drive letter in Enterprise manager when trying to create my new db. It just doesn’t show up.

    The only thing I noticed is in the Disk Management snap-in, I saw that our Sys Admin configured the new drive letter as a Primary Partition.  All other working drives letters (other than system) are configured as Logical Drives on an Extended Partition.  I removed the new drive, and then re-configured it as a Logical Drive on an Extended Partion so that it would be the same. 

    I still can not see the new Drive in Enterprise Manager.  I have not encountered this issue before.

    Any thoughts?  (the only thing I couldn't do after reconfiguring the new drive was stop and re-start sql server service due to users logged in.  This will have to wait until off-peak time tonight)

    Regards,

    Kevin

  • November 11, 2005 at 3:34 am

    #603378

    Hi Kevin

    Along with adding the disk to your SQL Server Group, you also have to make SQL dependant on the disk for it to appear in the drive listings in EM etc.

    So if you go into Cluster Admin, open the SQL Server group and take the SQL Server Offline (you'll find out why if you DONT do this!?  ) .

    Double click the SQL Server resource. Goto the dependencies tab and click modify. this gives you a little dialog box showing available resources (in the group) and current dependencies. Your new drive will be in the left hand list ... double click it to shift it over and click OK. Now when you bring the SQL Server back online, this physical disk will appear in the drive dialogs as expected!

    cheers

    Vinny

  • November 14, 2005 at 7:56 am

    #603647

    Vinny,

    Thanks for your assistance.  That was the exact issue.  I  added the new disk as a dependancy and we are up and running!

    Regards,

    Kevin

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