Hi and thanks for reading.

We have a multipath fibre channel SAN which is being broken into 3 areas.

One area is being used by Oracle (running on red hat) and this has its own file system so no problem there.

The second area is used to store virtual machines and will be using VMWare VMFS.

The issue is the third area (virtual disk) which is a general storage area for Windows 2008 R2 and Red Hat enterprise 5.5 linux. We would like to allow access to the same LUNS for both operating systems.

Have looked at StorNext and CXFS file system as a possible solution, but are there any open source that anyone is aware of, or does anyone have any recommendations.

Many thanks for any advice.

Would running NFS on the Windows server be a problem?

Shouldn't be.  This really has nothing to do with the SAN and is more of a filesystem issue.  You can use either NFS of CIFS shares and they are both accessible by Windows and Linux, or you might want to look into a NAS device (or NAS gateway if your SAN vendor supports them, I know EMC does).

You do not want to present the same LUN to two different hosts simultaneously, especially if they are running two different operating systems.  Besides the fact that it is highly unlikely to work you will most likely end up with all sorts of corruption.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCSE:Security 2003
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MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
MCITP:Virtualization Administrator 2008 R2
Certified Quest vWorkspace Administrator

Thanks for the update but the StorNext file system is specifically designed so it can support both Windows and red hat hosts with simultaneous mounting on the same LUN (at least according to StorNext tech support). But it costs about 2000 per server and there's 13 servers in total.

I'd had a look at NFS and my understanding (which may not be complete) is that it effectively works on a sharing basis over ethernet. With the level of data access that would be involved here there are concerns about shifting the data access over the LAN through shares rather than through the 4Gb fibre channels.

Any more advice or opinions would be most welcome and thanks for the responses so far.