As I already mentioned on my blog, here is some information on a somewhat confusing subject. I added two more questions about MSDTC that we hear often: Over the years, the best practi...
Published Jan 17, 2005
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This only applies to physical disk clusters, and most clusters are at a minimum RAID attached, or more often than not SAN attached. The arguement of saving a spindle falls apart since the presentation of a logical physical disk (yes those 3 words make sense together) by the RAID controller/SAN HBA has no relation to the underlying physical disk.
e.g. Take an HP shelf with 5 disks, build one RAID 5 array, present a minimal logical physical disk for quroum, present a minimal logical physical disk for MSDTC, present a maximal logical physical disk for actual storage. Similar rules apply for performance tweaking with multiple arrays of various RAID levels depending on ones needs.
Only on low end gear does one ever have to worry about physical disks having any relation to the logical physical disk presented by the controller to the operating system. All server class equipment I have encountered allows for the configuration of logical disks of any size within the array.
e.g. Take an HP shelf with 5 disks, build one RAID 5 array, present a minimal logical physical disk for quroum, present a minimal logical physical disk for MSDTC, present a maximal logical physical disk for actual storage. Similar rules apply for performance tweaking with multiple arrays of various RAID levels depending on ones needs.
Only on low end gear does one ever have to worry about physical disks having any relation to the logical physical disk presented by the controller to the operating system. All server class equipment I have encountered allows for the configuration of logical disks of any size within the array.