XServe RAID and Virtual Machines

We are a software developer doing most of our work with MS technologies. We are considering using an Xserve RAID in our Windows environment to store Virtual Machines. Does anybody out there fit our profile? We'd love to hear your experiences.

Are the computers using the RAID as directly attached storage or are they using XSAN (or another product) to access the storage as a SAN?
If they are using XSAN then I'm afraid you're out of luck as we there is no Windows client for XSAN. If they are using a different SAN product then perhaps you'll have more luck with finding a windows client.
HTH,
=Tod

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    Hi All,
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    Camelot,
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    Tod Kuykendall
    Posts: 1,237
    From: San Diego
    Registered: Oct 11, 2000
    Re: Xserve Raid Mounts, Corrupt Directory tired of rebuilding directory
    Posted: Jun 27, 2010 1:25 PM in response to: Todd Buhmiller
    Are multiple computers accessing the same data on the RAID at the same time?
    If so then NO. This is the source of your data corruption and I'm surprised if you were able to get all your data back every time if this is how you've been running your system. Each fibre channel assumes it has full and sole control of every volume it has mounted, no data arbitration is practiced and data corruption will occur if this assumption is wrong.
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    Intel Xserve, G5 XServes, XRAID, Promise

    +The xserve raids will mount automatically to any computer that I connect the qlogic fc switch to+
    This is source of the corruption to your data. Any computer that attaches to a drive/partition via fibre channel assumes that it alone is in control of the drive and data corruption is inevitable.
    +Is that the issue, should I disconnect the xserve from the fc switch and leave it connected via ethernet?+
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    Depending on your set-up it is possible for the two machines to see and use different parts of the Xserve RAID storage but they cannot access the same areas without SAN doing the arbitration.
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  • Xserve, G5, Xserve RAID and fibre channel question

    hi guys,
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    >is it possible to do ?
    Not in the way you describe, no.
    The XServe RAID's 14 drives are connected to two separate controllers. Drives 1-7 are connected to the upper controller. Drives 8-14 are connected to the lower one.
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    At the very, very least you need a fiber channel switch so that both the XServe and the G5 can connect to the same controller. However, as Tod has already mentioned, it is tricky to get multiple machines talking to the same RAID drives while avoiding corruption (there's no concept of arbitration, or ways of preventing one machine from editing a file that's in use by the other machine).
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    Page 4.
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