create a windows share in eva4400

[iinfi1]

Hi all,
i have not operated SAN (eva4400) myself. i have a few questions.
we need a common directory for our two load balanced IIS servers (F5 load balancer) to access. this should be on SAN and should not be shared from node 1 or node2 as we want a high availability.
Is it possible to make a NTFS partition on the SAN itself (eva4400) and map that drive to a Windows machine?

[Uwe Zessin]

The EVA is a block storage device and does not know what an "NTFS partition" is as it only works with disk blocks. You can present an EVA virtual disk to a Windows server and it looks like an empty disk.

Then you write a disk signature, create the partition table and finally create the NTFS - all _from_ Windows.

[Torsten.]

You can even use something like iSCSI or FCoE together with special hardware, but the EVA itself cannot manage a filesystem.

[Michael A. McKenney]

On my MSA 2012fc SAN, the Vdisks are split into LUNs that the server sees. Windows can map a drive letter to each LUN. Then, I create the Windows share to the directory or drive letter. All the SAN is virtual storage. It is just Vdisks with LUN (volumes).

[iinfi1]

thanks all
if i understood correctly i cannot have a single windows share mapped to two servers simultaneously. as ntfs cannot be mounted on two servers.
what i will do is, have a third file server and map the NTFS share from the fileserver.
does this make sense?

[Víctor Cespón]

You can present the same LUN to two Windows servers, but then they need to be configured as a cluster so there's a service that regulates the access to the shared disk.

Or you can present the LUN to a single server and then share it on the network (as a NAS).

[Michael A. McKenney]

You don't want the same LUN being written to by two different servers except in a cluster. You never want the same OS being accessed by two servers except in a cluster. You can corrupt an OS.

You might be able to do a non-OS data partition LUN with R/W from two servers. I would not recommend it. It could cause issues. However, if you had server A writing to application A and server B writing to application B. It should not cause a conflict. You would not want to share OS on non-clustered servers.

[Uwe Zessin]

> It could cause issues

It *WILL* cause issues if the file system was not designed for shared access - NTFS is not.

It does not matter if servers write to different folders of the file system - the meta-data has already been corrupted as soon has the second server mounts the disk.

Don't do that - period.

[iinfi1]

the current scenario is such that the two web servers which are load balanced using a F5 load balancer.
each of them has an independent disk and changes made in one are copied onto the other also.
I thought we could have a common disk so that we can avoid situations wherein changes are not reflected to the other node.

thanks a lot for ur replies