26.13 Ensuring That Any Data Files and Programs That Are to Be Shared Are Loaded onto Shared Disk Drives
This may seem obvious to some people, but it is well worth ensuring that we have performed all necessary steps. Don't assume anything! We also need to consider whether we load our application binaries as well as the shared data files onto the shared disk drives. Sometimes, it depends on the application; I know of some applications whose licensing is based on a unique system ID. In those cases, we have to load the application binaries onto each node individually. Some administrators I know prefer this anyway; should we need to perform an upgrade of the application binaries, we can test it on one node and compare it with results using the old binaries from another node. This seems like a good idea to me, but it does mean lots more work to upgrade every node with the application binaries as opposed to upgrading the binaries once, on the shared disk drives. As mentioned previously, licensing may take the decision out of your hands. I leave it to you to decide.