After both servers have Windows 2000 Advanced Server installed and configured, you need to make sure your hard disks and shared storage (quorum) are all visible and configured correctly. Let’s look at the configuration of the drives on each server. First, power up Node A (remember, only power up one node at a time, so you don’t corrupt the shared storage) and open the Disk Management utility.
You can view the Disk Management utility (as seen in Figure 2-4) by going to Start | Programs | Administrative Tools folder, and then selecting the Computer Management MMC. If you don’t have the Start menu programs extended from the taskbar properties,
Figure 2-3. Device Manager problems
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you can quickly access it by going to the My Computer desktop icon, right-clicking it, and then selecting Manage. If you need yet another place to pull this console from, you can go to the Control Panel and access Administrative Tools. When you open the console, you’ll see a Storage icon. Expand it to expose the Disk Management Folder.
When you select the folder, it takes a moment for Windows 2000 Advanced Server to pull all the current information and display it. Then you can configure the shared disk array you already set up in the first portion of this chapter.
Create disks with user-friendly names, so you know what you’re looking at.
Because this is a shared bus, you can see what you have in the server and what you’re connected to externally.
Make sure you format all drives with the NT file system (NTFS), which is based on permissions that are more efficient than the file allocation table (FAT). To format your drives, you can select the drive itself by clicking it, right-clicking it, and then selecting
Figure 2-4. Disk Management utility
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Format from the menu options. Remember, formatting the disk wipes out all data on it.
Once you select format, the Create Partition Wizard will prompt you to begin. This is the easiest way to create a formatted partition. Let’s walk through it and configure our quorum device. First, the welcome screen, as seen in the following illustration, prompts you to create a partition on a basic disk, which is important.
Once you begin formatting, read the welcome screen to get your definition of the basic disk. In Windows 2000, you have the option to make a disk basic or dynamic. A basic disk is a physical disk that contains primary partitions, extended partitions, or logical drives.
Basic disks can also contain spanned, mirrored, striped, and RAID-5 volumes created using Windows NT 4.0 or earlier. MS-DOS can access basic disks, whereas adynamic diskis a physical disk managed by Disk Management. Dynamic disks can contain only dynamic volumes (that is, volumes created with Disk Management). Dynamic disks can’t contain partitions or logical drives and MS-DOS can’t access them.
Now that you have your disks laid out, you need to remember they all need to be basic disks. Next, you want to select the type of partition you need. In the next illustration, you can see you have an option to select either primary or extended (then logical) partitions. Set up aprimary partition,which is defined as a volume you create using free space on a basic disk. As you can see in the following dialog box, it also lets you know you can set up to four primary partitions on a basic disk or you can create
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three primary partitions and one extended one. Our example is a basic setup, so we’ll select only the primary partition.
As you can see in the following illustration, you can now set the size you want to make your partition. Here, we’ll use the entire disk and all available space. The 4GB I allocated for my four folders, which only contain 500MB of data, is more than enough and gives me additional room for future growth until I need to redo the entire system.
If you preplan your cluster, you’ll know exactly what you need in the future.
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Next, you can assign a drive letter to your disk. Assigning drive letters in a cluster solution is different than assigning drive letters for a standard standalone system.
Because both nodes will be accessing this shared storage device, you need a common drive letter that both nodes can access. You might want to set your drive letter fairly high and not have your cluster nodes run login scripts. If you configure your nodes to access—for example, drive F—and you add some disks to your nodes, both nodes might not be pointing to the same drive and common storage space anymore. Assigning your shared storage high-drive letters, with aZranking and working your way down as you configure storage, is safer. This is because many systems administrators commonly use lower drive letters in login scripts to assign shared logical drives on systems running the login script. Most commonly, you can avoid this by starting with Zand working your way down. Checking with your systems’ administration staff to verify what letters in drive mappings they might be using today would also be safe.
In addition, be careful when you assign your nodes to a domain in which you could be running login scripts that could also conflict or alter your drive mappings. You can avoid this error by configuring the user properties correctly, which is explained later in the chapter. The next illustration shows the option of changing the drive letter.
Now you need to format your drive. Formatting your drive with NTFS is imperative.
Keep the allocation size as default and add a user-friendly name for the volume so you can quickly identify it. I named it “Quorum” to denote this is the shared storage repository.
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In the following illustration, you can see where you can set the volume label and file system type.
You have now completed a format and configuration of your drive. You’ll be greeted with a completion window, as seen in the next illustration.
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You should copy-and-paste the setting information to add to your documentation.
This makes information easier to recall during troubleshooting scenarios.