HP MSA - Sharing a volume among multiple hosts

[Phil Preece_1]

We have a HP MSA which is connected to our servers via two HP fibred san switches (ie: two fibre channels for fault tollorance). At the moment each server has its own volume on the MSA. We're introducing Microsoft HyperV and Microsoft SCVMM to our network. Mircosoft states a shared volume is required to store the virtual server. The idea is the HyperV hosts all have access to the volume where the vitrual servers are stored so the vm's can be moved to and from hosts quickly. However, I've been reading a article regarding the HP MSA and it states to avoid data corruption not to map a volume to more than one server! Surely this cant be the case? One of the reasons we invested in the HP MSA and HP SanSwitches was to provide us with a shared SAN volume.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Torsten.]

MSA?

MSA20/30/50/60/70/1000/1500/2000???

[Phil Preece_1]

Sorry... the MSA is a 2012fc. I doubt it matters but the san switches are HP 4/8.

thanks in advance

[Torsten.]

If you share a volume with a "normal" file system between "normal" servers you will certainly have kind of data corruption soon.
Cluster aware file systems are different.

[Uwe Zessin]

It is called a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) and available in Hyper-V R2.

Sounds like R2 is even supported on the MSA2000fc G1, but you really need to check all the details at:
http://www.hp.com/storage/spock

[Phil Preece_1]

many thanks for the feedback. will look into this now ;)

[Clarete Riana]

Data corruption should not be a concern as long as the shared volume is used for READ only purpose across servers.

[Uwe Zessin]

Some file systems cannot be mounted when the disk is presented read-only and this still does not solve the consistency problem, because the server with R/W access is constantly doing changes to the file system which do not get communicated to the other servers.