Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : iSCSI Windows clustered filesystem

[tomf]

Hi,

I'm currently connecting one of my servers to an iSCSI SAN but would like to hook up another server to that target as well. However, this doesn't work with NTFS filesystem and I couldn't really find any windows solutions for that. Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks,

Tom

[martyFREEDOM]

What type of SAN device is this, you should be able to slice out the disk to different luns to connect multiple servers.

[tomf]

I believe it's a LeftHand Multi-Site SAN.
I can connect to the same target from both servers but when I write from one server to the NTFS formatted target, it's corrupted on the other server due to the nature of NTFS.

[sailor]

how far away is the second server from the san - to confirm: is it a san in one place and you are trying to write to it from 2 different servers in 2 locations - one server being local to the san and the other remote?

[tomf]

Both servers and the SAN reside in the same data center but on different floors. The way I understand the issue is that iSCSI does block level IO rather than on the file level like a NAS and thus NTFS has issue with 2 systems accessing the storage simultaneously.
What I can do though and what works is that I cluster server A and B and set them up that whoever becomes primary mounts the iSCSI target and puts work on it.
However, ideally I'd like the target to be available from both servers simultaneously.

[tulix]

Haven't done clustering with iSCSI (just had a single "client" accessing iSCSI), but with all the rest - Fiber, FireWire, SCSI (regular) you would have to use "cluster" file system, otherwise file system will get corrupted every time you'll try to mount or to access the storage from two different "clients" - some of the file systems are very very pricey - $64K and more, so of them are free (with Linux and Oracle). I know under Windows you can use "shared" storage for specific applications like MS SQL.
I would think Windows Adcanced (and Datacenter) edition would have clustered FS built in (never tried personally).