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Best Practices when using Mount Points in SQL Server

Follow the following best practices when using mount points with SQL Server standalone and failover cluster instances -

Use the root (host) volume exclusively for mount points. The root volume is the volume that is hosting the mount points. This greatly reduces the time that it takes to restore access to the mounted volumes if you have to run a chkdsk. This also reduces the time that it takes to restore from backup on the host volume.

If you use the root (host) volume exclusively for mount points, the size of the host volume only has to be several MB. This reduces the probability that the root volume will be used for anything other than the mount points.

During failover cluster installation, use subdirectories under the root of mounted volumes to store database and backup files. For example, say you have a mounted volume F:\SQL1. This is the root of the mount point and you shouldn't use this location directly to store your database files. You should instead create a subdirectory/subfolder such as d:\SQL1\USERDATA and use this location to store your database files.

Add missing dependencies after installing SQL Server 2008 / R2 failover cluster with mount points. Make sure that each of the mounted volume is dependent on the root (or host) drive. Additionally, make sure that SQL Server is dependent on not just the root (or host) drive, but also on each of the mounted volumes.

If configuring MSDTC on failover cluster, do not use mount points as storage for the MSDTC service. MSDTC currently does not supported mount points.

Comments

Anonymous said…
have a question:
in a clustered environment, ca nthe root volume for all the mounts points be on the server or should it be a san volume?
I am thinking of using 1gb partition on my server1 for the root volume and similarly 1gb partition on the second server to hosts the drives for second server.
In this case what will happen ahd how will things work wieh a servers goes down and fail-over happens.
Anonymous said…
have a question:
in a clustered environment, ca nthe root volume for all the mounts points be on the server or should it be a san volume?
I am thinking of using 1gb partition on my server1 for the root volume and similarly 1gb partition on the second server to hosts the drives for second server.
In this case what will happen ahd how will things work wieh a servers goes down and fail-over happens.
Arindam said…
It should be on SAN volume.

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