Storage best practices....

[lorimer]

We currently have several clusters. Some are separated by site diversity, some are separated by processor capabilities. On the ones that are in the same datacenter, what is the best practice for storage? I know it needs to be shared across all nodes in the cluster, but should clusters share storage? Or is it best practices to mask the LUNs on the SAN so that each cluster only sees the disks relevant to it? I can see some advantages either way, but I'm not sure what the best way to do it is.

Any information/thoughts/etc. would be appreciated.

Matt

[lmonaco]

We only allow storage to be seen by servers that reside in the same cluster. It just make sense logically to us, the cluster contains a set of servers and a set of luns.

[williambishop]

Keep luns visible ONLY to the cluster that needs it. You'll find it grows to be unmanageable quickly if you make every lun visible to every host.

Personally, I put 4-6 hosts in a cluster, assign the necessary lun/s to that cluster and move on to the next cluster. Now, that cluster may have half of it's hosts in one datacenter and half in another for DR, but I do my best not to assign those luns anywhere else outside of the cluster. It's safer that way.

[mike_laspina]

I would create zones for each cluster and place the shared storage server in the cluster zones.

This way the separate FC cluster nodes do no see each other but they see all the required storage.