Topic: How to create mirror sets with Melio.
Overview: This tech brief explains how to create mirror sets to improve the resiliency of shared volumes and enable live storage/data migration to enhance the flexibility and agility of enterprise and hosting environments.
Briefing: Melio allows administrators to create shared volumes comprised of one or more mirrored pairs of physical partitions (RAID1) on block-based (SAN) storage or using local storage (VHDs) in physical server machines. The following instructions explain how to create mirror sets with Melio.
Note: Two-way mirroring (mirroring between two physical partitions) requires a quorum, which consists of the servers participating in the cluster and Sanbolic’s online quorum server. To establish a quorum, all servers in the cluster must have Internet access.
Prerequisite: Melio 4 SP1 (v4.0.5.26000)
Instructions for creating a mirror set
1. Provision and map two LUNs (of identical size) on SAN storage to two or more servers running Melio 4 SP1.
Note: If a two-node Melio Soft-SAN™ is being created, you will need to create and mount a VHD locally on each machine and then expose the VHDs as iSCSI Targets so they can be mounted on the opposing machine.
2. Open the Melio Volume Manager (Start > All Programs > Sanbolic > Melio Volume Manager) on one server.
3. In the window pane on the left-hand side, select the local machine.
4. From the toolbar at the top, select “View > Rescan disks.”
5. In the window pane on the right-hand side, right-click on a disk and select “Manage multiple.”
6. Confirm that the two LUNs (disks) are checked and click “OK.”
7. Once the disks are formatted, they will appear as “Managed” by the Melio Volume Manager.
8. To the right of the managed disks, where it shows them as “Empty,” right-click on each disk (one at a time) and select “New.”
9. Enter the size of the partition you want to create and click “OK.” Note the size of the partitions must be identical on both disks.
10. Once the partitions are created, they will appear in blue in the upper center window pane. From the toolbar at the top, select “Action > Apply Changes” and the partitions will change from blue to black.
11. In the upper center window pane, right-click on one of the partitions and select “Mirror > Create.”
12. In the “Make Mirror” configuration window, select the other partition to be included in the mirror set, enter a label (optional) and click “OK.”
13. From the toolbar, select “Action > Apply Changes” to create the mirror set.
14. Once the mirror set has been created, click “OK.”
15. Right-click on the mirror set and select “Create Logical Drive.”
16. Assign the logical drive a drive letter. Under “Initial Security,” leave the default option “Give everyone full control,” enter your license key in the License Key field and a volume label (optional). Click “OK” to create the logical drive.
17. A window will appear displaying the logical drive creation process.
18. Windows will recognize the new drive and prompt the user to format the drive with NTFS. Click “Cancel” as the drive is already being formatted with Melio FS.
19. When the logical drive has been created, click “OK.”
20. The logical drive will appear in the upper center window pane with its designated drive letter, label (if configured) and size. Below the logical drive, the synchronization status (orange) of the mirror set will be displayed.
21. Once the partitions in the mirror set have been synchronized, the mirror set will transition from orange to green, indicating that the logical drive is ready for use.
22. Open “My Computer” on all servers participating in the Melio cluster to confirm that each server has read/write access to the logical drive (mirror set).
To test the resiliency of the mirror set, dismount, disconnect or unmap one of the LUNs from the servers. The logical drive should remain mounted and accessible by the servers even though one of the LUNs making up the mirror set is missing. Create, change or delete some test files/folders and then mount, reconnect or map the LUN to the servers. Open the Melio Volume Manager to view the synchronization process between the partitions. Once synchronization has completed, the mirror set will transition from orange to green.
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