RHEL5 multi-host shared storage
 

I’ve been asked to investigate presenting the same SAN LUN to two or more RHEL5 hosts. The hosts are providing independent applications so they’re not clusters from an application perspective. The shared storage location would be used as a common area for imports/exports. We’re hoping to reduce file transfer times between the hosts by eliminating the need to copy the files between two storage locations. Some of our hosts run Advanced Server and some are standard. Is there a file system that I can use that will allow multi-host access without running advanced server with clustering services on all hosts?

Nope, sorry. The ZFS file system is something to consider, but isn't quite ready for prime-time. Don't know of any that can have two systems mounted to it at once, unless you're talking about a network-type system like NFS.

If you're doing it over SAN, do the data copy on the backplane. Have two separate LUN's mounted, and use data mover to shovel it across.

We use OCFS2 from Oracle which works without issues.