topic Re: Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume in StoreVirtual Storage

Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume

RobboRobson — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:04:18 GMT

Hi,

I hope someone can help with this.

My original plan was to have all my Terminal servers to connect directly to one Volume on the Lefthand cluster to allow all TS users to access their work.
I was then told that this would not work as there would be problems with multiple people accessing the same data. Is this correct?

As a work around i have 2 File Server that i can connect to this volume instead and then cluster those server and create a quorum on the Lefthand Servers.
Is this recommended or is there a better way of working?

I have also bought a server purely for backups and plan to buy Backup Exec and backup the volume using this.
Will this allow me backup the volume? or because i have a file server cluster, would i need to backup the data by installing the remote agent on the clusters and then backup the data using that?
Or is there a better way for doing this?

Thank you for your help

Re: Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume

Danny Petterson - DK — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:09:08 GMT

As a Volume on aP400 is a block-device, just as any directly attached disk, you can not share it between servers. So yes, it will very likely corrupt data when more servers are accessing the volume on the same time

You idea about a fileserver-cluster sounds just about right - continue in that direction.

As for backup, it might be faster to create a snapshot of the production-volume, mount the snapshot on the backup-server, and backup the data directly from this one.

Kind regards
Danny Petterson

Re: Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume

RobboRobson — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:07:49 GMT

Thanks for the info and help.

Do you know how i can automatically backup a Scheduled Snaphot and What i can use to do this?

I am concerned that i may have to this manually and if i am out one day, this might get missed by someone.

Thanks again

James

Re: Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume

Bryan McMullan — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:36:17 GMT

You can attach the snapshot to another server and back it up throught that server. But you are better off just backing up the base volume that is attached like you would backup any other filesystem.

So your snapshots would be your instant backup, but you could always restore from tape if you like.

Re: Multiple Windows Servers Accessing the Same Lefthand Volume

RobboRobson — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:05:23 GMT

Thanks for the response.

As the backup server is a separate server to the cluster, it will not be able to directly read the volume to back up the data.

As this is the case i want to automatically backup the data and won't be able to connect to that SAN volume so can only backup snapshots (i believe).
Unfortunately i would then have to keep manually mounting the snapshots on the backup server to do a backup.
This is what i want to avoid and i want to achieve a way of automatically mounting and backing up the snapshots....or find a different way of achieving the backup.

I didn't really want to install backup exec on the backup server and then install the agent on the cluster file servers and backing the clustered volume from the backup server through the file servers as this would slow down the whole backup process.

Does anyone have a better solution that doesn't require doing anything manually every night?

Thanks

James