EMC CX300 --> FC HBAs --> Multiple servers dont see the same data

[ForumKid1]

I have a brocade fiber switch that connects my EMC CX300 and 2 windows 2003 servers via QLogic QLA2340 HBAs.

Both windows servers see the 850GB LUN. If I partition the drive as NTFS on Server1, then go to use the drive on Server2, it asks me to partition it again.

My problem is that I can create folders on the SAN using Server1, but Server2 will never see those folders. If I create a folder on the SAN from Server2, Server1 never sees those folders. Basically, its like it creates its own instance for each server. I need one single shared instance.

Ive been battling with this for while now. I just cant seem to find where I went wrong or whats going on. Just looking for some guidance on what area I should look at(Navisphere, HBA config, server config (MPIO), etc)

 

[xmsre]

Only one server can "own" the b lock mode device at any given time. In the Windows environment, you would create an MSCS disk resource. The clusdisk driver implements a SCSI reserve to make sure that one node owns the disk at any specific time.


What is it that you are typing to accomplish? Do you want both windows servers to have access to the same data at the same time? If you, you proba bly want to access the disk via a file based protocol like CIFS that implements oplocks.

 

[ForumKid1]

Thats correct. I want both windows servers to have access to the same data.

We have 2 streaming video servers. The video files will reside on the san. So both streaming servers need access to the same data. There should be one single repository that all servers access. We have some linux boxes that will connect to the same data as well, but for now, I figured it was easier to get it to work with windows first.

Ill take a loop at CIFS. I know I use that on my linux boxes, but have never used it on windows. Ill do some additional research. I never thought it would be this hard.

 

[mrdenny]

No matter the OS, only one machine can own a LUN at any one time. If two servers try to write to the same LUN (doesn't matter if it's a SAN hosted lun, or shared SCSI, etc) the volume will become corrupt and you'll loose all the data on the volume.

Setup two Windows servers as a file server cluster and mount the SAN Storage on them. Then setup as many streaming servers as you want accessing the data over the network to the file servers. This will give you redundancy on the file servers, and scale out of the streaming servers.

Your only bottleneck should be the network connection within your LAN at this point.

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[ForumKid1]

Windows clustering isnt an option since its not a load balanced solution. Its just used for fail over.

Since I had one large LUN, i split it into two LUNs. Then my two streamers access separate LUNs using FC. This way I have redundancy incase a LUN gets damaged somehow.

My only other solution would be using some type of LVM such as Veritas. And that will be my option if I ever need more than 2 streamers.

As far as my linux boxes, they just do the video uploads. So sharing the drive on the streamer and then mapping the drive from the linux box works just fine since its really the streaming that takes up the resources.