Re: Failover with a shared disk

Sounds like what you are doing today is doomed to fail. Two Windows servers
should not access the same LUN simultaneously. The NTFS filesystem cannot
handle simultaneous access from multiple hosts so you will cause file system
corruption by doing so.

With that said, MS cluster can/must have the same LUN assigned to multiple
hosts. MSCS adds a filter driver that allows only one node to access the
disk at a time in order to prevent this file system corruption. MSCS is a
"shared nothing" cluster model so only one node of the cluster will ever own
the resource at a time.

With that said, it is certainly possible to have an application installed on
a shared disk and have it failover between the nodes. It might take some
tweaking in the application to make this work, but it is certainly do-able
with MSCS.

Regards,
John

Visit my blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/jtoner

<> wrote in message
news:021781d0-f8d1-45ed-a995-...
> Hi,
>
> I am new to failover and clustering. Presently my application doesn't
> support failover and I am planning the failover on windows using a
> shared disk which is accessible by two computers using SAN. Is there
> any method by which I achieve failover if I install the app on the
> disk which mapped/mounted to two windows systems so that the other
> machine will run the services when one machine fails?
>
> If Windows cluster technology does not support this design, are there
> any third party tools to achieve this?
>
> Thanks
>
>