HOW TO: Configure Disk Quotas for a Shared Disk in a Cluster

Disk quotas are a new feature in Windows 2000. This article discusses some of the considerations that you should look at when you are implementing disk quotas on Windows Clustering shared disks. You can enable disk quotas by accessing the properties of the disk volume in Windows Explorer, or through the Group Policy Object.

Method 1: Windows Explorer

1. Right-click the disk volume for which you want to enable disk quotas, and then click Properties.
2. On the Quota tab, click to select the Enable Quota Management check box.

Method 2: Group Policy Object

1. Set a Group Policy:
   1. Click Start, click Run, type mmc, and then click OK.
   2. In the Console menu, click Add/Remove Snap-in.
   3. Click Add, click Group Policy under Available Standalone Snap-ins, and then click Add again.
   4. In the Select Group Policy Object wizard, under Group Policy Object, leave the default location of Local Computer, and then click Finish.
   5. Click Close, and then click OK.
2. Enable disk quotas on the Group Policy Object:
   1. Under Console Root, expand Local Computer Policy, expand Computer Configuration, expand Administrative Templates, expand System, and then double-click Disk Quotas.
   2. Double click Enable disk quotas, and then select Enabled
3. When you apply disk quotas to disks that may not always be available to the operating system (such as shared cluster disks), follow these steps:
   1. On the Policy tab, select Enable.
   2. Click to clear the following two check boxes:
      • Allow processing across a slow network connection
      • Do not apply during periodic background processing
      
      
   3. Click to select the Process even if the Group Policy objects have not changed check box, and then click OK.
4. Restart the computer, or use the secedit command to refresh the policy. To do so, from command line, type:
   secedit /refreshpolicy machine_policy

Use of Domain-Level Accounts

You should only use domain-level accounts when you assign the quotas, because local accounts would not be enforced when the disk fails over, which occurs because the other node would be unable to resolve the SID for the local account. For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Disk Quota Conditions

It is important to consider the following conditions when you are using disk quotas:

• Disk quotas that you set on a partition apply only to that partition.
• You cannot set disk quotas on individual files or folders.
• Disk quotas are based on uncompressed file sizes. For example, if you have a 20-MB disk quota that contains 18 MB of data, you cannot increase the amount of free space by compressing the data.

To Implement Disk Quotas on Home Folders

For additional information about implementing home folders on a server cluster, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To Enable Disk Quotas in Windows 2000

For additional information about enabling disk quotas, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: