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Accepted
Cédric Boivin
Asked: 2009-08-25 13:13:31 +0800 CST

Share LUN between multiple VMs

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I want to setup a virtual network with 2 hosts and 4 VMs. I will have an equalogic SAN.

I want to share a LUN between two VMs, one on each Host.

The objective of the operation is to use ARR for IIS with sharing configuration.

To response to question, i will use Xen server

Je vais posé la même question en français. Selon les réponse que j'ai obtenu à date, je ne peux pas partager un LUN parmis plusieurs serveur. Je ne comprend pas très bien pourquoi je ne peux pas le faire, on parle de corruption de donnée. Pourtant lorsque je "share" un dossier sur un serveur, plusieurs machine peuvent écrire et lire sur le serveur en même temps. Pourquoi ce n'est pas la même chose avec un SAN ?

network-share iis-7 storage-area-network

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can't present the same LUN to multiple hosts (either physical or virtual) without either clustering the servers in some way so that only one writes to the LUN at a time. Doing so will cause the volume to become corrupt as soon as both devices try to write to the LUN at the same time.

    In Windows when you cluster only a single node of the cluster can access the LUN at any one time.

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  2. I'm not sure what the shared storage requirements for ARR are but you can present the same LUN directly to multiple guest VM's if you install an iSCSI Software Initiator in the guest and configure the appropriate access controls for the LUN in your Equallogic Group Manager. As far as the Equallogic array is concerned the VM's are no different from any other initiator.

    There will be complications though as the Hypervisor will generally not be 100% aware of the disks and that may affect things like Snapshotting\ Live Migration \ VM Cluster failover.

    You should also check whether Microsoft will support such a set up - they support some clustering involving VM's but not all.

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