iSCSI and Clustering

[Rene Feijen]

Weare doing some tests at this moment with clustering-services W2K-advanced
server. Instead of using a SCSI-based storagedevice as shared medium, we are
using an iSCSI appliance. According to a whitepaper from Microsoft it must
be possible to do, but our test fail to create the Quorum-disk onto the
iSCSI-appliance. We determined this after checking the cluster.log file.

We really don't understand why it doesn't work, since earlier testing on
W2K-server edition (no clustering) resulted in a OK situation with iSCSI.
One would expect that if iSCSI works allright on the OS-level, it would work
one level higher (clustering services).

Unfortunately it doesn't.

I hope Microsoft or a windows-guru can help us out, Microsoft in the
Netherland is not able to help us out here since iSCSI is too new for them.
For us it is very important to put the shared storage used by the cluster,
away from that clustered for disaster-recovery reasons.

Greetings,

Rene Feijen ([email protected])

 

[Doug Frisk]

Weare doing some tests at this moment with clustering-services W2K-advanced
server. Instead of using a SCSI-based storagedevice as shared medium, we are
using an iSCSI appliance. According to a whitepaper from Microsoft it must
be possible to do, but our test fail to create the Quorum-disk onto the
iSCSI-appliance. We determined this after checking the cluster.log file.

We really don't understand why it doesn't work, since earlier testing on
W2K-server edition (no clustering) resulted in a OK situation with iSCSI.
One would expect that if iSCSI works allright on the OS-level, it would work
one level higher (clustering services).

Unfortunately it doesn't.

I hope Microsoft or a windows-guru can help us out, Microsoft in the
Netherland is not able to help us out here since iSCSI is too new for them.
For us it is very important to put the shared storage used by the cluster,
away from that clustered for disaster-recovery reasons.

iSCSI is new to everyone.

The iSCSI target has to support the SCSI release and reserve commands, but
in my experience you can still create a disk resource you just cannot move
it between nodes if that support is missing.

What's your target and what initiator are you using?

I'm guessing that your initiator is not initialized before the cluster disk
driver or cluster service starts.