Hello, please don't bash me if I ask stupid things. I am only an "acting admin". The situation is as follows: a storage box (3TB) configured as RAID5. One volume, one LUN. An FC switch. Three servers. I would not like to use (for now) a clustering FS. I am reluctant to configure / reconfigure the storage. I know too little of these things. Are the following schemas allowed: 1) connect the switch using FC to each of the servers, and then create three partitions (e.g. with parted or fdisk). Then mount at each of the servers only its own partition. Will that work reliably? In theory, the switch gives block level access to the shared device; the servers should not access anything simultaniously, and hence no data inconsitency should occur. 2) the same, but use a LVM -- create logical partitions, and let the three servers use each its own logical partition. Again, sorry if the question is trivial or just plain stupid. j.
I'd suggest not doing this. Three hosts sharing one partition table sounds like disaster. Say you reinstall the first host with the partition table. what happens to the other machines? divide the 3TB as needed into three luns. zone the luns to the correct hosts. Then there's no way at all they can botch up data on another machine. Also, there's no reason to present data to a host that it doesn't need to access anyways.