Re: BAD BAD CLUSTER - NEED TO REMOVE and RESTART - Some Valued Opi

Hi
This cluster has NEVER been 100% right. In fact, when resources would fail
over and back, it would take 8 mins + to bring them ONLINE! 8 mins!

Yet my VM Cluster (which uses basic disks) resources take 30 seconds! this
is how I would expect the behaviour! Again, I do feel the Veritas is to
blame, because when looking at the logs, it attempts to unmount the volume,
then dismounts from the Server and this alone can take 45 - 1min per disk !

I think in a way there is a signature written within the Veritas Software.
When I uninstalled the software, no other product could see the disks other
than Veritas - In other words, an OS can see the disks, but treats them as
new or foreign. so I can understand that being dynamic and linked in with
Veritas is going to cause me some issues.

But as the cluster is not behaving as it should, removing the "extra" layer
of complexity would help!

Thanks, Simon

"Edwin vMierlo" wrote:

Simon,

I understand the pain.... and I have experienced some "interesting" behavior
with Veritas on Clusters as well, and to-date, uninstall Veritas was
definitely my preferred solution for these mis-behaviors. MSCS can only take
basic disk for clustered disk resources.

You are facing a dillema, not really signature related, but you are having
dynamic disks created by Veritas, and you want to move to basic disk, so
here goes

If you have a "Simple DynamicVolume" which is a dynamic volume on one
physical disk, you can convert back to basic, without data-loss.

If you have a "Mirrored Dynamic Volume" which is 1 dynamic volume, mirrored
on two physical disks, you can convert back to basic.

If you have any other form of dynamic disk, such as "Spanned volume" or
"Striped volume" you can NOT convert back to basic.

Although you can convert some dynamics; I would strongly recommend you
commission new disks from your storage, and do a data-migration. Just for
the fact that you will start with fresh new NTFS basic volumes for your
cluster.

It is a bit of pain to go through, but if you carefully plan, with help of
your storage vendor to help you with the commission of new disk and
migration of data, you probably will benifit of a more stable system in the
long run.

Rgds,
Edwin.



"Simon" <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:224B3D8D-C79F-48DB-AFA0-FE4A48D7E476@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello everyone
Base setup for your info:

2 x Node Cluster Win2k3 SP1
Each Node has "Veritas Storage Foundation" installed and configured. This
application was to make basic disks into dynamic, integrate into the
cluster,
allow you to change disks on the fly, increase, decrease size, ect! It
does
other stuff, but in my opinion and experience, its been a HUGE HUGE
nightmare!!!!
The disks are created from a HP EVA SAN Based Solution - Currently each
node
acts as a FILE SERVER and hosts 8 disks.

PROBLEM: Need to remove the cluster and rebuild. BIG PROBLEM: The Veritas
Storage Foundation Software appears to have made a "signature" on these
disk
volumes. It means, that they cannot be presented to any other windows
server
system, unless we install the Veritas software on another box!

We DONT want this software - its been the clusters problem all along, and
I
need to get shot of it.

Trouble is, does anyone have any experience of this product, more so, is
there a way to "release" these disks so that a bog standard Win2k3 Server
can
see the disks and treat then as just disks that contain data. At the
moment,
when these disks are presented to any other server, they are known as
Foreign
and Windows wants to blat them :-)

As they contain TB of data, its not an option.

WORSE CASE: Create brand new disks from my EVA, basic, restore data from
backup tapes (which is long and hard, but can be done). Dont want to try
this
just yet. Hence, any opinions are welcome.

I am sure the Veritas product is good ... in my professional view....
trying
to make a basic disk into dynamic and making it sing and dance is not what
I
wish to achieve.

And whats wrong with Diskpart - something I have used all the time and
will
continue to use to change my disk size.

Cheers
Simon



.

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