MSA1500 Shared Partition Linux

[Ron Nash]

Hello SAN gurus,
I am trying to implement a MSA1500 to utilize Disk-to-Disk Backups. I currently have DL380s running SuSE 9 & 10. I was wondering if it is possible to share a partition between multiple Linux systems. On our MSA1000 it was possible to see the size of other partitions from other OS's. I did not try to write to these partitions, but assume that it is possible. I can create a partition on SystemA and mount that partition on SystemB, but when I create data on SystemA, SystemB does not see that data. I am using Selective Storage Presentation to break up the Arrays into groups for each server. That way we can get the most out of disk space as possible out of the MSA1500. Any assistance is appreciated.

Thank you,

RN

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

You must not mount ext2/ ext3 file systems on two servers concurrently, because this file system is not cluster-aware. You see one symptom: SystemB does not see updates from SystemA - it does not matter if SystemB does not write to the file system.
You need to get hold of a file system implementation that allows proper concurrent access.

[Ron Nash]

We ended up using Oracle Cluster File System 2(OCFS2).

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/

Thank you,