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I have recently provisioned two servers that are attached to a Lenovo S3200 with fibre channel. These are the only two servers attached. The servers are running Windows 2016 Nano, and I have installed MPIO and claimed the FC paths. And I created an NTFS volume on the shared SAN disk.

The problem is that when I put a file on the shared volume from one server, it doesn't show up from the other server until after a reboot. I have observed this behavior in both remote PowerShell as well as through the Hyper-V Manager.

Ryan
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    NTFS is not a shared-storage file system. Mounting the same LUN with an NTFS file system on it on more than one system isn't going to work. It's quite likely to corrupt the filesystem. Your question is pretty much an exact duplicate of this one: https://serverfault.com/questions/295190/how-can-i-use-ntfs-and-iscsi-and-not-corrupt-my-san – Andrew Henle Apr 21 '17 at 21:32

2 Answers2

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NTFS is not a cluster-aware file system. It was never designed to support simultaneous access from different clients.

In order to allow multiple access: configure MPIO, deploy the Failover Cluster feature on both servers, create the new cluster and add your SAN volume to Failover Cluster as CSV (Cluster Shared Volume).

Strepsils
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    You can actually make NTFS "cluster-aware" with some redirector bold-on (CSVFS or MetaSAN). See whole thread here: https://forums.starwindsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1392 – BaronSamedi1958 Apr 26 '17 at 21:11
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    This was the issue. My background is VMWare, so I was configuring Nano > MPIO > LUNs > Hyper-V > Cluster. What worked was: Nano > MPIO > LUNs > Cluster/CSV > Hyper-V. Thanks! – Ryan Apr 27 '17 at 21:29
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To make this work, you need a NAS control over the drive that allows each of the systems to access the disk as a network drive, not a LUN. Windows knows how to share (or rather, knows a file share is shared space) where it doesn't realize raw diskspace is shared. The real issue here is Windows keeps part (or all) of the directory structure in memory, and if both systems write data, they can both write it into the same sector causing corruption.

Best bet if you need to share this space with two servers is to put it behind some form of a NAS device (or even FreeNas, etc).

Jean-Claude DuBois
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