iSCSI architecture - for the SMB Market - multiple sessions and corruption

User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 

Thanks to many cool new products we are seeing iscsi hit the small to medium size business market.  We are using it ourselves now in our lab and production environments. 

As many unsophisticated tech departments experiment with using iscsi volumes in different ways I would like to share an experience to save someone out there some trouble.

You cannot connect 2 windows servers to 1 iscsi volume.  It will eat itself.

Windows/NTFS cannot be aware of multiple 'sessions' to the file system and will both work thinking they have the entire volume to 'themselves'.

See conversation on the subject here: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=147&t=27357&p=109431&hilit=corruption#p109431

We setup some test networks to have a couple servers use one volume and immediatly saw this problem, it's not sporadic, it's consitent and persistant.  There is no such thing as a workaround.  It appears to be okay at first, until you use it.

The fix is to create an iscsi volume for every machine that will connect.  If you need to share, using Windows file sharing on top of this platform.