How to disable Storage Pools/Disks to be available to other nodes in SQL Cluster?

Question

I am creating a SQL Cluster in Azure. This SQL cluster is mostly based on the Microsoft documentation article called "Tutorial: Configure an availability group in multiple subnets (SQL Server on Azure VMs)". This way you can create an SQL cluster with a cloud witness, which in event of a failure, will failover from a node1 to node2 (and vice versa).

We are configuring an Always On Availability Group (and not Failover Cluster Instance), in which disks are not supposed to be shared among nodes.

However, there is one functionality that we want to turn off. Storage Pools / Disks are shared among the nodes. For example, node1 can remove/delete disks or storage pools on node2 and vice versa. Example is on the image below, where in Server Manager it says under the "Available to".

How to disable this functionality? We want node1 to be able to see only disks that belong to it, not disks from other nodes.

Answer 1

Hi Eldin Egrlic,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

We would like to inform you that, to disable the functionality where Storage Pools/Disks are shared among nodes in an Always On Availability Group (AOAG) setup on Azure VMs, you can follow these steps:

1. Use Separate Storage Accounts: Ensure that each node in your AOAG setup uses separate storage accounts. This way, the storage resources are isolated, and each node can only access its own disks.
2. Configure Disk Access Control: Use Azure Disk Access Control to restrict access to the disks. You can set up role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure that only the intended node has access to its disks.
3. Disable Shared Storage Pools: In the Server Manager, you can disable the shared storage pools by removing the disks from the storage pool on each node. This ensures that each node only sees its own disks.
4. Use Azure Managed Disks: Azure Managed Disks provide better isolation and management of disks. You can assign managed disks to specific VMs, ensuring that each node only has access to its own disks.
5. Network Security Groups (NSGs): Configure NSGs to restrict network access between the nodes. This can help in preventing one node from accessing the storage resources of another node.

I hope this information helps. Please do let us know if you have any further queries.