Is there a way to simulate a SAN for clustering purposes?

[iMaCutlip]

I am trying to create a staging/test area for our production system,
but there is one big difference. The staging area does not have a
fiber attached SAN as does the production environment. This causes a
problem because I cannot cluster two of the machines together unless
they are sharing a common storage device. (Microsoft varified this
cannot be done with a network share).

Is there an easy way to simulate a SAN so that a new drive appears,
but the new drive is really a mapping to a share somewhere? I think
this would allow me to setup clustering.

Someone suggested that I setup Virtual PC on each of the two machines
and then have them share a virtual drive that is stored on a network
share. Then I could setup the cluster using the virtual PC's. This
approach seams a little clunky to me, but this is stagine/test anyway
and is better then no solution.

You thoughts are greatly appreciated!

-Aaron

 

[David Adner]

Unless you're performing IO intensive performance tests, I would just
string fibre from your production SAN to these test systems. If that's
not possible, then you can try purchasing a cheaper(?) shared SCSI disk
array. I say cheaper in that it's probably cheaper than buying a
separate SAN system.

If you just need MSCS running with no plans to test failovers and such,
you can use the /localquorum switch that allows you to point to local
disk. It's only intended for development purposes, though, so I don't
know if it suits your needs.