I didnt think of DFS until you mentioned it but being able to solve this delimia was bugging me (and I wanted to learn something in the process!).
With that said, I have learned more about clusters, “shared storage”, “SCSI – 3 persistent reservations”, etc in the last two days than I wanted to (two nights till 2:00AM) but I figured it out!
Things I learned:
- Server 2012 is the first standard version of Windows server that is cluster capable (previous version you had to have data center). It is very picky about its shared storage – especially that phrase “SCSI – 3 persistent reservations”.
- I first tired FreeNAS (most recent version FreeNAS-8.3.0-RELEASE-p1-x64) however Server 2012 failed on the Validate a Configuration Wizard tests due to not having SCSI – 3 persistent reservations.
- With the help of this link: http://blog.jamiebaldanza.org/2012/08/14/ubuntu-12-lio-iscsi-target-configuration/ I was able to get plain old Ubuntu to host a special version of iSCSI for the shared storage (the version of iSCSI target that works is "lio-utils"). From what I’ve been able to read, normally shared storage devices are very expensive and this worked in a test environment.
Its pretty dang cool. For the heck of it, I connected to the shared storage file share, and started reading files. I rebooted one of the clusters and kept reading the shared storage in the background….it never missed a beat.
Thus far, I have one part missing and that’s the cluster aware duplicate of the shared storage. I have not tackled it yet.
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