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Can 2 virtual servers share the storage?

A

ajalele

n00b
Joined
Feb 21, 2014
Messages
3
So here is the setup:

Physical server 1 is hosting virtual server A and physical server 2 is hosting virtual server B. There is also a 2TB SAS with two controllers. Controller 1 is connected to physical server 1 by two cables and controller 2 is connected to physical server 2 by two cables. Both controllers have an Ethernet connection as well that is connected to a switch. On virtual server A the 2TB SAS shows up as an attached hard drive that is being shared to the rest of the network. On virtual server B you can see the shared network drive from server A but it does not show up as an attached drive.

My question is can both virtual servers be configured so they both see the 2TB SAS as an attached drive? Or is the proper configuration to split the 2TB between the two virtual servers so they each have 1TB a piece and then have the two drives replicate each other. The ultimate goal here is to make it so if one virtual server goes down the files can still be accessed via the other virtual server.

Is this possible or am I just an idiot?
 
There's some info missing, a 2TB SAS what? A network attached storage device that presents NFS volumes? Some network attached fakery that only works if you load proper drivers into the operating system?

You cannot have two servers use the same disk as an "internal" disk.

The the VMs are identical, then you may be able to replicate the VMs as a whole rather than monkey with storage, or use High Availability features of your hypervisor. Need more info.
 
ajalele said:
Yes it is a network attached storage drive that present NFS volume.
Click to expand...

In that case you should mount the NFS volume in both hosts and that will be fine.

What's the guest OS on the VMs? What's the hypervisor?
 
I'm confused as well ( admittedly not that experienced in the storage world ).

You're saying there is 1 SAS unit and both physical servers are connected to it by both a sas cable and network? What exactly is this SAS unit?


As with any block device, a block device can only be controlled by one thing at a time. There would be no coordination between the two servers so the file system would get corrupted.

You can see it appear via NFS as it would be presenting it as a file-level device. (Although now that I'm thinking about it, you shouldn't be able to have the device show up as NFS and a block device at the same time).

On virtual server A the 2TB SAS shows up as an attached hard drive that is being shared to the rest of the network. On virtual server B you can see the shared network drive from server A but it does not show up as an attached drive.
Click to expand...

So I'm interpreting that the "shared network drive" is the nfs mount. If this is working, why do you need to have it show up as an attached drive? I would just stick with the NFS route.

If you really want to, you can do something like RedHat clustering where it can coordinate which server is the master, but again, not really recommended approach.
 
The guest OS for A is 2003 and B is 2012.

Sorry for all the confusion. I am a new network administrator for my company (I just finished my second week) and I just kind of walked into this very poorly maintained IT infrastructure and I am trying to straighten it out. I was confused about why the 2TB was set as an attached drive if it has NFS capabilities. When you open B and look at the 2TB drive is says its drive S:/ and its coming from server A. So to me this means if A goes down access to the files goes with it. I have not yet tried taking down server A to see what would happen.
 
ajalele said:
The guest OS for A is 2003 and B is 2012.

Sorry for all the confusion. I am a new network administrator for my company (I just finished my second week) and I just kind of walked into this very poorly maintained IT infrastructure and I am trying to straighten it out. I was confused about why the 2TB was set as an attached drive if it has NFS capabilities. When you open B and look at the 2TB drive is says its drive S:/ and its coming from server A. So to me this means if A goes down access to the files goes with it. I have not yet tried taking down server A to see what would happen.
Click to expand...

Sounds like that is just a simple CIFS share (mapped shared drive).
 
It's configured "wrong". Whomever set it up added it as NFS to VM_A, and then used a Windows share from VM_A to VM_B. Maybe there was a reason to do that, but it sure seems like the better way would be to just mount NFS on VM_A and VM_B, remove the mapped drive from VM_B, and remove the Windows share from VM_A (unless it's shared to a bunch of other machines as well).
 
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