SAN disks not shared properly

[Manoj Somanathan]

Hi All,
Might sound silly, pretty well, I am a beginner to SAN technology.
I have connected HP MSA 1500 to two machines, a windows server 2003 and a windows server 2008 through SAN Switch. In ACU, I created two LUNs, and assigned to both the machines using SSP. Now in disk management of both the machines, I can see the storage space.
For testing, I created a notepad in one of the machine in the shared LUN. When I open the same LUN in the other machine, I cant view the file.
Is there any additional configuration to be done to make it possible? Please help

[Víctor Cespón · Accepted solution]

Yes, you need to read a little about CLUSTER.

Two Windows machines cannot access the same disk at the same time. You need to create a cluster so that you can share a disk between two servers.

[Rob Leadbeater]

As mentioned above you must have some clustering software installed.

If you don't, you will definitely corrupt the file system.

Cheers,
Rob

[Marcus Schack]

The answer is simple. When you have Windows O/S on a server you should never present the same LUN to multiple servers. If you do this, you will get "corruption" as Windows always wants to write a signature to the drives that it sees. The only time you can present the same LUN to multiple Windows servers is in a "cluster" environment.

[Manoj Somanathan]

Which is the best clustering software you suggest?
BTW, is it is possible to cluster 2 uneven servers with different OS version in it?

[Marcus Schack]

As far as what the best clustering is. That depends. Most people go with the Windows clustering solution, since it is widely used and good resources available for support. Also, it generally is not recommended to have two different O/S version in a cluster. Since nodes are expected to fail over from one node to another, without incident, you want to make sure everything is the same on both nodes.

[AnthonySN]

In windows2008
In Server Manager, under Features Summary, click Add Features.
In the Add Features Wizard, click Failover Clustering, and then click Install.

attached is a doc from MS about a two node failover cluster.

[Manoj Somanathan]

Thanks all for ur help.
What is that I can do for setting up a common repository which can be accessed by all the Windows machine in the SAN setup?

[Víctor Cespón]

You need a NAS box I think. That's a server that shares the disk space it has available through shared folders. You can have any number of hosts accessing files on those shares.

[Uwe Zessin]

Why not use simple CIFS file shares on one server?

Windows is very reliable these days and if one system is down for an extended time you still have the option of changing the mapping of the MSA's logical disk(s) to the other server.