Setting up the shared disks and volumes for a Microsoft cluster

You must set up shared storage and volumes for the cluster, ready to accept the shared data. Each Enterprise Vault virtual server requires one or more volumes in which to store the following:

MSMQ data
Indexing Service data
Storage Service data (vault store partitions)
Shopping Service data
PST holding folders
EMC Centera staging areas

It is good practice for MSMQ data, Indexing Service data and Storage Service data to each have a separate physical disk resource. Placing them on the same drives may result in degraded performance.

For example, if you are setting up two Enterprise Vault virtual servers, EVSERVER1 and EVSERVER2, you might allocate the shared storage for the cluster as follows:

Cluster Group	Volume Q: Quorum data
EVServer1	Volume I: MSMQ data Volume J: Index data Volume K: Vault store data Volume L: PST holding folders, Shopping service data, staging areas
EVServer2	Volume M: MSMQ data Volume N: Index data Volume O: Vault store data Volume P: PST holding folders, Shopping service data, staging areas

Note the following when setting up the shared disks and volumes:

You must configure the storage for different resource groups on different physical disks, since only one server can connect to a physical disk at a time.
Configure shared disks and volumes such that the required nodes will be able to access to the clustered disk resources on failover. For example, in a 2+1 configuration, the failover node must have access to the quorum data volume, plus all the volumes used by both virtual servers.