I am currently researching setting up DotNetNuke in a FibreChannel Switched SAN environment using the following specs:

• IBM BladeCenter HS21 Blades
• Multi path FibreChannel HBAs on each Blade
• DS4800 Storage RAID array
• Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise
• Windows Clustering Services

I want to setup the blades in a clustered environment along with a LUN on the DS4800 Storage.  I want both blades to be clustered so that they have shared access to the Disk Array (as opposed to using the UNC method of shared access to the DNN files).  When IIS / ASP.NET starts, the application will load from the shared disk.

1.)  Is this possible?
2.)  Has anyone setup DNN in a similar (SAN) environment before?
3.)  If so, any "gotchas" I should be concerned with

Thanks.

-- W.G.

DNN webfarms are hardware independant ... you should be able to get one running on a bunch of old pentiums if you really wanted to :)

You didnt say how many blades you have in total, and what you want to have on each ... sounds like 2 blades that you want to build one cluster out of, and that will be your IIS server.  Plus I imagine you also have another box, probably a blade as well for the DB server, but you do not have a box for the fileserver, instead you have a SAN - are all these assumptions correct?

First thing is that a cluster behaves to all intents and purposes like a single box.  So you just set up DNN as normal.  You wont get load balancing, unless you have more than one cluster.

For IIS, you must use the UNC share method - using a SAN should be identical to using a dedicated fileserver.   The only other method is file replication (replicate onto the IIS blades), which is never a good idea, and very hard to get working correctly.

I have not used a SAN as the fileserver - and I dont even know how a SAN will be different, after all you can still set up a shared folder with a UNC path on the SAN, right?

As for gotchas, everything you need to know is in 3 places, the DNN webfarm guide, the MSDN webfarm guide (link can be found in the DNN guide), and Phillip Beadles blog .. search for "caspol"... but you have probably read all of these already.

JK - a battle scarred DNN webfarm veteran.

Based on further reading, and comments here in this thread, here is how we have decided to setup the environment:

• 2 Blades running Windows 2008 Enterprise
  • These blades will run in clustered mode with failover to the SAN LUNs:
  • One cluster will be the Failover FileServer (to support UNC pathing for DotNetNuke files)
  • One cluster will be the Failover for SQL Server.
  • One server will act as primary for the FileServer, and one server will act as primary for the Database.  This allows the environment to run so that the DB traffic goes to one server, and the FileSystem traffic goes to the other.  In the event of a failover, all traffic for both will consolidate on one server until the other node can be brought back online.
• 2 Blades running Windows 2008 Standard with IIS7
  • These blades will run behind a hardward loadbalancer device from Cisco (don't know the model as of this writing)
  • These blades will be configured to use the clustered UNC (as mentioned above).
• All blades have redundant (teamed/multipath) connections to the network and SAN.

As of right now we have the initial OS installed, and are in the process of configuring clustering of the FileSystem and Database.

I'll keep posting to this thread with any further results.

Thanks!

-- Will Gillen