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January 17th, 2008 19:00
Two Hosts Accessing the MD3000
I have two PowerEdge 2950 servers running Windows Server 2003 R2 attached to an MD3000. Each server has two HBAs, and they are connected as shown in the "Two Hosts (with Dual-HBAs) Using Redundant Data Paths" as shown in Figure 2-9 on page 14 of the Installation Guide. The two servers are in a host group (MYGROUP).
I have created a virtual disk and assigned it to the MYGROUP host group. Both servers can see the disk in the Disk Management module. Both can write to the disk. But neither server can "see" the other server's activity on the disk. As an example, if I create a text file on the disk from ServerA, ServerB cannot see the file (and vice versa).
My question is do the servers have to be clustered in order to see each other's disk activity? I was under the impression that you could cable two hosts to the MD3000 and have each of them access the virtual disk simultaneously. I'm well aware of the issues of file contention and corruption, but this will be a read-only scenario for each server for the most part. And neither server will be trying to write the same file at the same time.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Kent
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January 18th, 2008 10:00
What you have set up will cause you a loss of data (the time it takes for this to occur isn't definable, but it will happen).
Each server needs to have it's own disk space. It can be in the same disk group, but each has to have it's own virtual disk(s).
If you want to set up a Microsoft Cluster, you'll want to read up on this. Here is some documentation from Microsoft about this.
In a Microsoft cluster, only 1 server at a time can read and write to and from the disk (it'll be the server that owns the resource), so servers still can't really access/share the drive at the same time. Also, you'll need Windows 2003 Enterprise edition (standard cannot cluster) (see here).
If you absolutely need to share disk space for simultaneous access by 2 servers, you'll need to give the virtual disk to 1 server and then have it share it out (over your network) and have the other server map it as a drive letter.