LUN presented to two hosts having issues...

[B_MORLING]

Hi,

I've created a new LUN and mapped it to an initiator group which includes two hosts. Each host can see the LUN, however do not see the files added by the other. The volume is formatted to NTFS. The odd things I have noticed are:

• In the root of the LUN, Explorer only gives me the option to create a new folder.
• When creating directories/files on one host, I receive the error “The Recycle Bin on F:\ is corrupted. Do you want to empty the Recycle Bin for this drive?”

I've recreated the LUN twice and received the same results. I'm obviously missing something but I'm not sure what.

Thanks in advance!

[NEXEN_COLINB · Accepted solution]

Hi Blake,

Depending on what you're trying to do by having this filesystem available on two hosts at the same time it may or may not be possible.

At the heart of your issue is that NTFS is not a clustered filesystem.  This means that it does NOT support being mounted simultaneously on two hosts.  

Some options

• If you look at MSCS / Failover clustering you can support a service where the filesystem is active on one host and can fail over to the other host.
• If you need to have simultaneous read/write access to a common filesystem, in a pure Windows way, you should be looking at SMB (aka CIFS) shares not LUNS or you should be looking at 3rd party cluster filesystems.
• Depending on your windows version you may have other Microsoft solutions (2012 has some interesting fileserver capabilities that leverage SMB3.0)
• You can also, with Win2008 +, mount a volume via NFS (from the command line) and have it available on both hosts simultaneously.

If you want specific suggestions, share some background on what you want to achieve.

Cheers

Colin