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I've got a Promise vTrak m210p subsystem. It supports LUN mapping & masking, and has two SCSI channels (2 VHDCI ins & 2 outs on rear of device). I believe this question will probably apply to many devices of this type.

According to the literature: "With support for up to 256 Logical Drives (LUNs) per array and 32 LUNs per physical drive, the M210p delivers a robust, flexible platform for storage and server consolidation and advanced costs savings. By sharing storage resources among multiple servers, users can take advantage of high availability configurations and employ resource sharing for cost effective storage solutions that maximize capacity utilization."

So my question is this: how can I share this device between multiple servers (directly)? My gut tells me that I could connect one server per channel, so two servers.

Edit: I'm not looking to cluster. Instead I want multiple servers to access their own logical devices.

Boden
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2 Answers2

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This one is actually quite easy as there's a limit to how that box can be used in this way.

Basically you can link it to two servers, each with an external parallel SCSI-320 interface (something like an Adaptec 29320A-R for PCI bus or 29320LPE for PCI-e bus, each with a single cable from it to the disk box)

You then NEED to partition, format and access it with a cluster file system from BOTH servers.

You don't mention which OS you're running on these servers but for Windows there's 'Windows Cluster File Services' and the excellent 'Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows - Enterprise Edition', for Linux there's a fair bit of choice such as OCFS2 and lots of others.

Hope this helped.

Chopper3
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  • Thanks! I don't want to cluster, though. What I'm thinking is that I can create two logical drives and map them to separate SCSI channels, and then connect each server to a channel. That should work, yes? I've read the manual on this thing, but it doesn't say anything about it. – Boden Nov 06 '09 at 16:56
  • Ok, that should work, I just don't know for certain sorry. – Chopper3 Nov 06 '09 at 18:00
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connect it to a server(s), and share via NFS or iSCSI?

monomyth
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  • No, I'm specifically talking about two or more servers connecting directly. I'll modify my question... – Boden Nov 06 '09 at 06:10