Relocating Microsoft Cluster Quorum using SnapMirror

woodwarg07 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:23:20 GMT

This weekend we are relocating all our LUN volumes on our filer to new disks using SnapMirror and will be maintaining the same drive signatures.

We have a couple of Microsoft cluster servers and I'll be stopping the microsoft cluster services beforehand, I assume I just need to disconnect the existing drives and reconnect them through SnapDrive. The only trepidation I have is with the quorum, if the Microsoft Cluster service is stopped is there anything special I need to consider in terms of SnapDrive to disconnect and then reconnect the quorum drive? I realise SnapDrive is cluster aware, I just want to make sure the steps I go through will be correct and not cause any problems.

Re: Relocating Microsoft Cluster Quorum using SnapMirror

sourav — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:12:14 GMT

Create and move Quorum to a Temp Location

Create a new 500 MB lun to be the temp location for the Quorum resource
- Place it in the same group that contains the current quorum
- Make a note of the drive letter used (X: in this example)
Open the cluster administrator on the active node
- Expand the cluster group and verify the new disk is in this group.
Right click on the cluster name in the upper left hand pane and choose "properties"
Click the "Quorum" tab
In the Quorum Resource drop down choose the new temp location (Disk X: in this example)
Go back to the group containing the Quorum resource and take offline the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) service.
Once the MSDTC resource is offline, delete the MSDTC resource

Free Up the Original Quorum Drive Letter

Back in cluster administrator offline then delete the Q: disk resource (If you missed a step trying to offline the disk will produce errors)

Create and move Quorum to new final location

Open the cluster administrator on the active node
- Expand the cluster group and verify the new disk is in this group.
Right click on the cluster name in the upper left hand pane and choose "properties"
Click the "Quorum" tab
In the Quorum Resource drop down choose the new location (Disk Q: in this example)

Remove the Temp Quorum LUN &Reinstall MSDTC

In cluster Administrator, open the group containing the quorum and take offline then delete the temp Quorum disk (X: for this example)
Starting with the active node, open a CLI and type "msdtc -uninstall" then "msdtc -install"
Repeat this step for each passive node.
In cluster administrator the MSDTC resource should automatically appear
Check the properties of the MSDTC service and verify the dependency is on the cluster name and the Quorum disk, should be Q:
Online the MSDTC resourceTesting and Clean-up
- Using SnapDrive or your other storage management tools remove/unmask the LUNs that are no longer needed.
  - In the example here it would be the R:\ and X:\ drives
  - If you make a mistake here or this process takes your cluster down just remap all the luns used for this process and then troubleshoot accordingly.
Move the group containing the Quorum to each of the passive nodes and then back to the "active" node.
- If this process completes the quorum and MSDTC service are working properly.

Create another new 500 MB LUN to be the final location for the quorum resource.

Place it in the same group that contains the current (but temporary) quorum resource
You should now be able to use the original drive letter, Q: for the sake of this demonstration.

Using disk administrator change the drive letter of the original quorum drive (Q: in this example) to something else, lets use R:

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Relocating Microsoft Cluster Quorum using SnapMirror

Re: Relocating Microsoft Cluster Quorum using SnapMirror