StarWind Software

Hi.

I have 2 WS2008R2 computers with a C drive connected to a network.

I've successfully created the shared image as E drive on both using the powershell scripts and replication is working but... When I make file changes to the target E drive these are not replicated across directly, I need to offline the E drive on the second server and online it again to see any changes made on the target E drive and any changes on the second server are then lost.

I'm sure this is just brain fade on my part but what am I missing from the setup to get this to work as expected? The current setup actually will meed my needs for a shared storage manual failover but I'm sure it could be more automatic.

Welcome to StarWind forum!
You have the StarWind device formatted as NTFS, I guess.
Unlike file-level protocols like used in NAS, iSCSI is a block-level protocol. Thus it cannot arbiter read-write access to the iSCSI device connected to multiple servers. Thus, to provide access to one device from multiple servers the device needs to have a clustered file system. 3rd party arbiter SAN management software (DataPlow SFS, MelioFS, MetaSAN etc) should be used for individual client servers. If using vSphere 3rd party management software is not necessary since VMFS is a clustered file system. At the same time Microsoft failover clustering allows to share single storage device between the nodes of the cluster. For instance, Hyper-V failover clustering is achieved by converting the iSCSI storage to a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).

Yep, mental block on my part

I need to use Windows Failover Clustering.

Yes, you need CSVFS on top.
No worries, feel free to contact me if any assistance is required.