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My Environment: Dell PowerVault 220S connected via SCSI to 2 Dell Poweredge 2950s. I have installed ESX 4i on each of the 2950s, and do NOT have VCenter. I will be using Windows Server 2003 Datacenter on each server for 3 installs, a SQLDEV, SQLTEST, and SQLPROD. They will each be clustered, so machine 1 will have a SQLTEST, and machine 2 will have SQLTEST-2. The same for the others.

My question: How many Disk Partitions will I need on the PowerVault to handle clustering? They will be 2-node clusters for each OS. I'd like to get away with 1 Partition for each of the Cluster components. But as I read, that may not be possible. I know I need 1 partition for MSDTC, 1 for Quorum, and 1 for DATA. I'm thinking I will need 3 Quorums, 3 MSDTC, and 1 Data. Is this correct? Or will I need 3 DATA also?

Many thanks for any input you can provide.

Matthew Williams

Werewolf
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You only need a single VMFS partition/datastore to store the actual VMs, they you'll need a single RDM LUN for each of the MSDTC, Quorums and shared data mounts for each cluster (i.e. three data). The reason is that this isn't a 6-way cluster but 3 x 2-way clusters right?

Chopper3
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  • Correct. I have the VM's stored locally on each server, with the shared data in the middle. Thanks for the quick answer. I was hoping to avoid 3 data partitions, but I'll make do. – Werewolf Feb 01 '10 at 16:58
  • I'd be tempted to store the VMs centrally too if I were you, that would prepare you better for moving to using VC if you ever need HA/DRS/SVM etc. – Chopper3 Feb 01 '10 at 17:01
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    Great answer. Storing the VMs on shared storage is an excellent recommendation even without VC it allows you to swap out the actual server hardware pretty easily - moving the VM's then just becomes a case of de-registering the VM in one host and re-registering it on another. – Helvick Feb 01 '10 at 17:21