MSSQL - Quick Tips: How to Add a New Clustered Disk to SQL Server Cluster

This post is one of the "Quick Tips" posts series that gives a quick guide about how to deal with simple tasks in your DBA's day-to-day life, and in this post I will show how to add a new clustered disk to an existing SQL Server cluster.

Adding new disks to the current running SQL Server is a task any DBA may need to do many times during his\her career, the task of adding disk to a local SQL instance is a straight forward one by default, but what about adding disks to clustered instance?

It is still a straight forward task even it may take some extra steps, let us go through it...

The first step is to add the clustered disk to the “Windows Cluster“, this can be done by opening the Failover Cluster Manager, expanding the cluster name then right click on “Storage” folder, select add disk and then select the disk to be added into the windows cluster.

Second step is adding the clustered disk into the targeted SQL Server instance’s resource group and then add it in the dependencies resource list for SQL Server database engine.

Third and final step is to make sure that the SQL Server is currently controlling the disk and can access it normally, this can be done by querying the DMV sys.dm_io_cluster_shared_drives which shows a list of the clustered disks attached to SQL Server or by trying to create a testing database on the new attached disk.

-- Queries

-- Checking with DMV

select * from sys.dm_io_cluster_shared_drives

-- Checking with creating a testing database

-- Assuming that the clustered disk letter is "I"

CREATE DATABASE [TestDB] ON  PRIMARY

( NAME = N'TestDB', FILENAME = N'I:\TestDB.mdf' , SIZE = 3072KB , FILEGROWTH = 1024KB )

 LOG ON

( NAME = N'TestDB_log', FILENAME = N'I:\TestDB_log.ldf' , SIZE = 1024KB , FILEGROWTH = 10%)

GO