Looking to configure MSA and 2008

[tomd_2]

I have an MSA and C3000 3 Win2008 servers, 2 Vdisk on the MSA. My question is there anyway to share this one VDISK among the 3 servers. It seems that the servers wants me to create a partition, configure, and format the drive in order to use the MSA. Is this the correct way to attach the MSA to the Win2008 servers or do I need to create smaller vdisk and attach? Just seems like I am missing something, but maybe not. thanks in advance

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

a vdisk is only a bunch of disks with a configured RAID level. You need to create volumes, which are some kind of partitons on the vdisk. A volume can be presented to a server and can be used like a normal hard disk.

Check the MSA2000 User Guide.

Best regards,
Patrick

[tomd_2]

I have created volumes and I can attach the volumes to the Win2008 machines. However, If you have one volume and want to share that one volume among 2 servers, is that possible, as the volume on each Win2008 machine wants to format the volume or am I missing something?

Thanks for the response

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

sharing a volume between two W2K8 servers is possible, but that will result in data loss oder data corruption. NTFS can't handle multiple access from two hosts.

Best regards,
Patrick

[kris rombauts]

Tomd,

you'll need to look into either a cluster solution (which might not be your objective) or some shared filesystem solution or filesystem with locking features which are 3th party so non native to Microsoft Windows.

If you don't then you'll corrupt the filesystem sooner then later since one server does not know about the other's activities on the same filesystem.


HTH

Kris

[tomd_2]

So, in reading it sounds like I should maybe use DFS, maybe in 2008? or create smaller volumes to attach. I am wondering if DFS might be better if I need to add another MSA to the configuration? What is you opinion on this matter?

I thank you all for the responses

Tom D

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

DFS is not a filesystem. DFS is used to create a single name space for many fileservers and shares. Instead of accessing a fileserver and a share, you access a DFS with a DFS link. You client will be redirected to the fileserver with the right share.

Best regards,
Patrick