As with every IT environment new elements and upgrades are becoming a daily task rather than being a yearly task few years back. One of the most consuming upgrade task is storage migration. Your boss has just bought this new shiny storage box & he got it installed by the vendor in the datacenter. Now he need you to move all your production workload to it in no time. Well, if you are in a totally virtualized enviornment and has no Microsoft Clusters in place, then this can be easy and dandy with features like VMware Storage VMotion(ah sorry Only VMware offer such a feature at the moment, but that is not our topic for the day. Anyway did you choose the right Virtualization Product? Hope So!).  If you still in the physical world then this is much more work even for non clustered machines, but machines with Microsoft Clusters will be the ones to involve the most amount of work. In this Article I will show you how to migrate Microsoft SQL Cluster Data from your old SAN to a new one  If MS Exchange is what you are looking for then look at: Migrating Exchange 2007/2003 Cluster to a new SAN. The same steps should work for:

Microsoft SQL 2000 Cluster Data Migration to a new SAN

Microsoft SQL 2005 Cluster Data Migration to a new SAN

Microsoft SQL 2008 Cluster Data Migration to a new SAN

Microsoft SQL Cluster Data Migration in Physical & Virtual world where RDMs are used

Note: a small modification might be required for Microsoft SQL 2008 & MS SQL Server 2008 R2.

Warning: Data Migration always involve a high risk. Always make sure you have  a proper back in place before trying/carrying out such a procedure.

Moving Quroum drive in Windows Cluster:

1. Take offline all cluster group and dependant services
2. Add two 1 GB volumes label them tempQ and finalQ to the cluster group
3. Make sure quorum and tempQ and finalQ is online.
4. Move Quorum resource to tempQ
5. Copy Dtclog from original Q  Drive to finalQ
6. Change Drive letter of Q to another letter
7. Change Driver letter of finalQ to Q
8. Move the Quorum to new Q
9. Make sure all resource dependant on old Q its dependency is changed to finalQ
10. Move tempQ and oldQ to a temp cluster group and disable them
11. delete msdtc resource
12. Open command line on both nodes, then run comclust on both nodes starting with node1 (don’t close the command prompt of node 1 till node 2 is finished)
13. Ensure MSDTC is created and ok, then bring the rest of the resource back online and start testing the failover.

Moving SQL Data Drives to the new SAN:

1. Format the new data disk and give it unused drive letter. And label it new S for example
2. insert the new data disk new S to the sql cluster group.
3. Ensure all the cluster groups are on node one, and take all the cluster groups offline
4. Bring the S drive resource and the new S drive resource online
5. Use synchrofolder  or  CloneDisk to copy S drive to the new S drive
6. Change S drive letter and change new S drive letter to S
7. Change dependencies of all resources dependant on S drive to new S
8. Move S resource to the temp group.
9. Take the S resource offline then bring it online again
10. Bring the cluster group online then the SQL cluster group
11. Test the failover.

OK, I have mentioned two tools in here to use for cloning the Drive. To find CloneDisk download just search in Google for CloneDisk22  as the exact file name of it is CloneDisk22.exe. The synchrofolder can be found by searching Google for: SynchroFolder_1481.exe. Sorry I did not provide a copy of these software due to copy rights and license reason, though you should be able to obtain a free copy or trail of either easily online which should give you enough time to carry out your migration. While these two tools are the one I tried, there is many others that could do the same job of cloning the disk. Please note that CloneDisk work on the block level where Synchros Folder work on the file level, where CloneDisk is my preferred method of the two as it ensure its a full clone block by block.

I hope this help some one! Please feel free to leave your questions or comments in the comments area below.