Share Files

semenov · Sat Jan 29, 2011 12:37 am

Guys,

1. set of 10 VMs
2. Each VM has it's own IP, they are load balancer by several MS IIS ARR devices
3. Each VM is basically a IIS7 shared configuration host
4. Each VM lives on its own physical device that has a Direct Attached Storage (so code lives on a local hardware)

Now is the question

5. All VMs run the same application and share the same code, that is placed on DAS to have higher peformance
6. All VMs should be able to get access to the same set of files (pdf, zip, tgz, doc) that should live on SAN managed by StarWind

so it's like a NAS storage. When VM write a new file into that SAN storage, other VMs immediately can get this file back *(download) if ARR load balancing happens

7. So is it possible to mount iScsi device for each of these VMs? So let's say each of these machines got disk Z:/ as iScsi disk (managed by StarWind)
8. Now the VM app uploaded the file and put it into Z:/documents
9. A request on other VM came in to download newely uploaded document, so that other VM will have the same Z:/ mounted and logically should be able to grab the file and send it back through http to requestor.

possible?

so all VMs should have Z:/ that actually pointed to this iscsi target device (the same LUN)

Sat Jan 29, 2011 2:13 pm

Did you read this?

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t1392.html

semenov · Sat Jan 29, 2011 10:32 pm

Okay Clear, so not possible. Then I'm thinking this will work:

1. A server runs Windows SRV 2008 R, I'm installing StarWind onto it and do CIFS shares based on Storage Managed by StarWind
2. All VMs mount the same folder (CIFS share) locally and will be able to write/read files simultaneously.

Will that approach work?

Sun Jan 30, 2011 10:02 am

1) It *IS* possible. But with either cluster-capable file system (CFS, MelioFS, GFS etc) or write arbiter (MetaSAN, don't know other guys but you can Google...).

2) Yes, listed below scenario sounds as a working one.

semenov wrote:Okay Clear, so not possible. Then I'm thinking this will work:

1. A server runs Windows SRV 2008 R, I'm installing StarWind onto it and do CIFS shares based on Storage Managed by StarWind
2. All VMs mount the same folder (CIFS share) locally and will be able to write/read files simultaneously.

Will that approach work?