Shared drive facility - one that all servers can access
A shared drive so that common script components can be shared throughout many servers - e.g. we have common php framework files that we reference from many applications.
Adrian Hall
shared this idea
Not as simple as you’d think as attaching a drive to multiple servers without a shared file system (like zfs) would result in file corruption. Best to set up a separate server (VM) with the files on it which then exports this as an nfs/smb share to your other servers. We’re planning to make such an ‘appliance’ available as a template server shortly.
3 comments
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John commented
Yeah - you could mount it ro of course....
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Carl Garner
commented
Could this be provided as a pre-built "NAS-style" appliance which uses a minimal amount of system resources (like a real NAS), but which has as large a storage space as required.
Coupled with a VLAN, this makes it the perfect option, though it might be better to offer a specific price for this instead of building it from the available resources?
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Daniel Keighron-Foster
commented
This is not as simple as it seems.
In general, shared disks of any type cannot be accessed by multiple servers concurrently unless they have a clustered file system otherwise data loss will occur.
This can be achieved in Linux but does mean you need to know what you're doing.
Windows does not have an inbuilt clustered file system that will allow multiple servers to concurrently access files.
This is the same principle as when accessing a SAN or some sort of external disk array from multiple machines.
It's generally simpler to either share a folder from one server to another, or use some technology to keep it in sync between the servers.
