Problems setting up P4300 Starter SAN with Windows Cluster

[KevinBCI]

We purchased a P4300 7.2TB Starter SAN and had HP out to install it about 2 months ago. My experience with SANs and NAS is limited, having only administered one after it had already been setup by a predecessor. I had them do a basic install, then attended a web training by HP for 2 days, and thought I was set.

To cover my setup, it's 2 of the P4300 G2 storage units with 2 P4000 Storage Nodes running Windows Storage Server 2008. I am able to create volumes, get them identified by the iSCSI Initiator, share it in windows by the first server, and access it from my laptop.

However, I wanted to set up the 2 managment servers as a cluster in Windows for Failover so when I access a share, if the first server goes down, the windows cluster will failover and the second one can pick it up for rendundancy. This is similar to how the existing NAS was set up in Windows Server 2003.

When I created the Windows cluster it won't recognize any available storage whatsoever. I thought I had it licked after calling HP and the guy pointed out I had to have both server that were in the cluster sharing the volumes. After doing that it still won't see the storage.

Am I making this too complicated? Should I not even bother with the windows clustering? If I don't, and I power off Server1 then I can no longer access the share \\server1\share

[Larry Schuldt]

What version of Windows? Did you create GPT or MBR volumes?

Windows 2003 server does not natively support GPT volumes for clustering. You CAN install a hotfix that remedies this problem.

Something else that happens is that the cluster installs fine, but after a reboot, the volumes aren't seen as clustered. That is usually because the cluster service starts before the iSCSI service. To fix this, you need to set up the iSCSI initiator as a dependency for the cluster service. If you are running multipath, you should set up the multipath service as a depency for iSCSI and iSCSI as a dependency for the cluster service.

larry