One computer with two SANs

Is there any way to have one computer part of two SANs at once?

yes, it definitely is out of the scope of "traditional" apple supported methods... however, you can easily separate what is called your name servers with a third or separate name server that is in control of whom connects to what SAN. This is supported in the StorNext world, just not Apple. At a basic level you are modifying the fsnameserver file on all of the clients and all of the MDCs to reflect a separate and dedicated nameserver. This allows you to mount either SAN's volume. Note, you will not be able to use the Xsan GUI after this as there is no way that I know of that it will be able to know what is going on. You will be living in the realm of the command line.

Granted... I haven't done this with traditional Xsan only setups. I have done this with an Xsan with Apple MDCs and other Linux based StorNext MDCs, where the clients mounted both the Apple Xsan volume and the Linux StorNext volume.

I suggest not doing this with "live" date unless you are looking for "fun" :)


-Jordan

I think this is a very high glossy take on what Apple has offered since 2.0. They just make it look like there are completely independent sans. The wording however makes me believe they are in fact just multiple servers of the same SAN definition. Apple has always had the ability to leverage load balancing so to speak on different MDCs.

I could be completely wrong, but I "think" this example is a bit different than that separate nameserver scenario where you have 100% completely independent MDC pairs. Please correct me if I'm wrong, it would be awesome if Apple did in fact embrace the "real" multisan.


-Jordan

We are big multi-san users. We have 5 pairs of MDCs each pair controlling 2 to 3 volumes only. It isolates issues and allows work to be done on volumes/mdcs without affecting the others.

It is a poorly named and understood even by Apple themselves.

John

You simply need to add addition MDCs. One additional pair for every volume you want hosted separately. You can then set the new mdcs to be the failover to the volume/s you want to isolate. You will then failover to theses new mdcs and then deselect the old mdcs from the failover list.

We have separate fibre zones for each multi-san volume. Any client you want to mount a particular volume must be in the zone. We only zone in the mdcs in charge and the associated storage to isolate the storage and mdcs for the other volumes

Yeah - I wanted multiple sans