Linux – Mount LUN from SAN at the same time in Windows and Linux

linuxmountntfsstorage-area-network

I have a mounted NTFS partition under Windows (2003) and Linux (RHEL 5.7) at the same time. The LUN resides on SAN and is presented to both servers at the same time. At first, the setup looks ok as I initially can see files from both Windows and Linux.

Writes are only initiated from Windows and I mounted the partition under Linux with read only (ro) and no access time (noatime) options. But when I add files from Windows, I can't see them under Linux. Is there anything I'm missing? Is it even possible at all?

I would like to achieve this in order to avoid copying from the network for a data migration of > 1Tb. Do you see any other way to do it?

Best Answer

As far as I know NTFS is not meant to be used like that and the only thing you will probably achieve this way is invalid data read from the filesystem.

You can either unmount the filesystem from windows and mount it on linux for the migration, or you can use some clustering filesystem for this purpose. Unfortunatelly I know of no opensource cluster filesystem that is capable of this.

I believe CXFS and StorNext should be able to do what you want.

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