Two nodes mount in a same volume of EVA6000

[robin99]

Hello all,
I have a rp7420, three c8000 workstations, and a EVA6000. They are connected each other via SAN. The rp7420 mounted a specific volume of the EVA6000 but three workstations need to only read files in the volume, not write. The workstations can see physical paths of the volume but I'm not sure that the workstations can mount the volume. Without 3rd party s/w, can the workstations have read-only mount of the volume that is mounted by the rp7420?
I hope that you will give me a good answer.

Thank you.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Robin,

Is nfs not an option? You could share or mount the filesystem with read only option.

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[Hein van den Heuvel · Accepted solution]

Without some sort of cluster software, there is no coordination of writes to a disk. Each system thinks it owns the disk and thinks it understands the contents.

Now clearly a read-only second mounter will not harm the disk, but it can get mighty confused perhaps to the point of taking down the system.

This is mostly because system mounting the disk for write has the right to postpone and re-order writes to its liking, catching up at SYNC time (Typically every 30 seconds).

NFS is really the way to go, even though the systems may be able to directly see the disk.
In fact it may be best to make sure that the other systems can NOT see the drives through ZONING in the switch or presentation choice in the EVA.

Now I _thought_ a mount could _reserve_ a drive making sure only 1 system can mount a disk at a time, but I forget which systems/storage supports that.

hth,
Hein.

[robin99]

Hi Goossens and Heuvel,

I already considered NFS but my customer didn't want NFS. I may have no way except NFS in according to your reponses. I need to talk with my customer about NFS. :(

Thanks for your reply. ;)