Hi, new to this forum and to clustering so hopefully someone may be able to help me.
I have just set up an HPC cluster on 5 servers with 1 head node and 4 compute nodes all running Win server 2012. I also have a DAS disc array Dell Powervault MD3200) which is connected to all nodes by HBA cards and SAS connectors. A Raid 10 array with 1 virtual disc has been created and mapped to all 5 nodes on LUN 0.
I have just now found out that sharing a volume this way using NTFS does not seem to work and what I see is that when one server puts data onto the array, the other servers do not see it and vice-versa. I have had a long conversation with the array provider who says that in theory it should work but NTFS is not really any good in this environment and you need to use VMware of some other cluster file system to get SAS shared volumes to work properly. This is a real blow (and expensive).
My real question is that I see that Failover Clustering does support CSV’s but I do not know if that is something that can be used as well as HPC Pack 2012? I do not actually want failover clustering itself, just the CSV capability that comes with it. Is it possible to install the role but only use CSV’s with the 'HPC Cluster Manager' actually handling the cluster or is this cluster manager not in any way the same as the 'Failover Cluster Manager' and both cannot work together?
Or is there another alternative to get the sharing of the SAS array working within Server 2012 NTFS
Hope this all makes sense.
Thanks