This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
7869
July 8th, 2014 00:00
MD1000 Unified Mode and 2 Active Directory Servers
Hi all, I am no expert with servers, however i do get through well enough.
I currently have 2 identical servers poweredge 2950
One is a master windows 2012 server active directory server and the other is the same but the mirror slave.
I have a MD1000 Powervault connected to the active directory master controller, however i thought to myself, not allot of good having people being able to login on the backup secondary if they cant access the md1000 where all their files are.
So question, i currently have the MD1000 running in unified mode. Is it possible to connect the other server up to the other side or anywhere else to have it also showing on the slave?
That way if the primary controller goes down, people can still login and access their files on the MD1000.
I hope that all makes sense.
If not, does someone have a suggestion for how they would accomplish this?
DELL-Sam L
Moderator
•
7.7K Posts
0
July 8th, 2014 08:00
Hello stoogle,
Due to the MD1000 configuration being stored on the PERC card that it is attached to you would need to have the same configuration on both cards in both servers. If you were to connect the secondary server it would only see the drives that haven’t been configured yet. What you would need to do if you were to have your primary server go down is to remove the PERC card that is connected to your primary server & install it in the secondary server and then power on the secondary server and make sure that it see the new PERC card. Once the PERC is seen by the server then you should be able to access the data on the MD.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
July 8th, 2014 08:00
This isn't an option with an MD1000. You need raid controllers that communicate with eachother, which isn't an option with the PERC5E/6E/800/810.
Shared storage like you have in mind requires specific hardware as well as certain software.
For the hardware you would need a SAN like an MD3000 and then could attach the MD1000 to the MD3000 (this does assume you have Dell certified drives (the MD1000 doesn't require this, but the MD3000 does)).
As for the software; you'd have to set up a cluster, which really shouldn't be done with AD servers (but the servers do need to be joined to an AD).
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
July 8th, 2014 16:00
If you are running shares off of the storage on the MD1000, you could do the following:
- back up the network shares registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Shares) somewhere other than the server that the MD1000 is normally attached to
- ensure both servers have a PERC6E with the latest drivers and firmware (it's important that they don't use a PERC5E or a PERC6E with old firmware as the PERC6E got support to hot-connect an MD1000 with one of the newer firmwares (after the original release of the card).
When your primary server goes down and it doesn't look like it'll be back up in an acceptable downtime window, you power down the 'bad' server, disconnect the MD1000 and connect the MD1000 to the other server. Have it do a rescan in device manager to discover new hardware and then check disk management to see if the disk is seen. Verify the drive letter in Windows matches what the other server was using for the MD1000 disk (as the registry key points to that drive letter) and import the backed up registry key. You'll then go to the services and restart the server service (this runs the shares). Your shares should now be up and running again, but on the other server. Your users would need to remap their shares to the other server's name/ip, but then will have their data again.
stoogle
2 Posts
0
July 8th, 2014 16:00
Thank you for the quick and very easy to understand responses.
That's not so bad, down time would be very minimal then.
So if those information about the raid setups and drives are stored on the perc card, would i need to backup that information on the perc card and if so how would i do this?
Just thinking if the perc card ever failed that would cause mayhem?