2

I am working on building a NLB cluster to load balance for JavaEE portal. Both are Virtual Windows 2008 R2 and connected via Fiber Channel to an EMC SAN Storage. They should read/write files into the same logical drive to the SAN (F:) .

How can I configure this situation in Windows to allow both servers to access the same SAN drive simultaneously with high performance?

Please help, Thank You All!

Improve this question
1
  • What filesystem and locking manager are you using, it won't do it using vanilla NTFS, you'll just massively corrupt the LUN.
    – Chopper3
    Jan 2, 2013 at 15:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

First of all, you need to arrange for the VMs to have access to the same LUN. This is different than a normal LUN allocated to VMWare, as you won't be installing VMFS on it, but instead passing the device through straight to the VMs. This is called a "raw device mapping", and be aware that it will force you to use a different method to move the VMs around among the hosts.

Once both VMs have access to the same LUN, you're ready to start. Unfortunately Windows does not make this situation as easy as it should be. Windows 2008 R2 can't have multiple nodes mounting a Shared Storage Volume simultaneously (except for Hyper-V, which really isn't the same).

What you have to do is setup a Clustered File Share on both servers. One will be the primary file access server, and other(s) the backup(s). You can then mount the network share, or use UNCs, and run the website from that. If you didn't have Shared Storage you'd use DFS-R to duplicate the storage structure on both machines' DAS.

Side note: Server 2012 has CSVs for general purpose access to clustered or NLB'd applications (not all application apply, notably SQL).

Improve this answer
4
  • Thanks for your quick response , I heard that It could be done by using EMC Powerpath , please advice.
    – Radi
    Jan 2, 2013 at 14:36
  • 1
    I'm not familiar with EMC's software, but it's possible they filled in the missing bits to allow general CSVs in Server 2008. You'd have to check with their documentation and support however.
    – Chris S
    Jan 2, 2013 at 14:38
  • 1
    PowerPath does not support having a LUN be active on multiple servers.
    – mrdenny
    Jan 2, 2013 at 18:51
  • does this method work ? drobo.com/downloads/how-to/HT-0127-00_windows-iscsi-mpio.pdf
    – Radi
    Feb 1, 2013 at 18:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .