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TempDB on non-clustered drive?

  • December 9, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    #217557

    I've seen a few posts about this online, but most are dated from about 5 years ago, so I'm not sure if things have changed.

    We have a new clustered Windows 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 (2 node) environment we're building. We're using iSCSI for the SAN drive (let's not turn this into a discussion about whether or not that's a good idea, that ship has sailed). This is setup as a single drive, and both nodes can access it properly, etc. We'll call it the I:\. We also have some nice, completely under-utilized drives on the local machine, which SQLIO has shown to be significantly faster for the sequential reads and writes that TempDB is famous for. Since TempDB is technically transient, and we don't need to retain the data between failovers of the cluster, I'd like to get it onto the local drive, E:\.

    The problem is that the SQL Server instance can only see I:\. Ideally I'd like Windows clustering to monitor E:\, but not replicate the data. Is there any way to do this? I've seen a couple of posts where people "tricked" Windows into doing that, but I have 0 interest in that.

    Thanks for your time,


    Rick Todd

  • December 10, 2009 at 2:06 am

    #1090407

    In a clustered SQL Server, all DBs must be on shared drives that have been set up as resources in the cluster and set as dependencies of the SQL Service.

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass

  • December 14, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    #1092225

    With Veritas clustering this can be done, but not with Microsoft. I think it would it would be good if it was available in MS, the servers that are usually purchased come with local disk that can be configured seperatley from the OS mirror and as TempDB is recreated each time SQL restarts it doesn't matter which physical node you are on as long as there are the same folder structure. Seems a shame to waste disk, and not split out the IO.

    Andrew

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