MSA 1000

[asarak]

Hello , i have two HP ML570G2 Servers.
One of them is connected via Optical Cards to an MSA 1000 SAN which is attached our MSSQL Database, i also connect the other server to the MSA 1000 and i would like to "attach" the drives that i already have from the storage also to the second server.
Any ideas???

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi,

that's not possible (well you could do it, but you would corrupt your data)
2 servers cannot access the same volume without some sort of locking mechanism. An MSCS cluster would be able to do this, but only one server would have access to the volume at any one time. Also a cluster requires the enterprise editions of Windows and SQL. Even if you already have Enterprise SQL, you would need to uninstall and reinstall it so it would work in a cluster.

Regards,
Stephen

[asarak]

Stephen thanks a lot,
about the cluster... this is what i am going to do the next days....
But as i already know i must to connect the MSA1000 to both Servers, (Physically connection), Install Cluster Service , then install mssql in cluster... (all these to both nodes and finally restore my database into MSA 1000 ...

thanks a lot
regards

Anastasios Sarakinidis

[Craig Howe_1]

If you want to be able to connect to the same volume with both servers, then as mentioned the MS cluster solution will only work active/passive.
Polyserve (www.polyserve.com) will enable multiple nodes (servers) to write to the same volume concurrently. The cluster solution also has a module for SQL server. It uses it own PSFS Polyserve file system.

[Craig Howe_1]

I forgot to mention also that the Polyserve solution doesn't require you to have Enterprise versions of MS Windows or SQL Server which in a SQL environment can be a huge cost. The only reason to perhaps move towards MS Enterprise versions of software under a Polyserve cluster solution is to take advantage of other enterprise edition benefits (eg, recognises more than 4GB Physical memory)