Multiple ESXi Hosts accessing the same Virtual Disk

This was sort of our plan for our virtualization setup. I had a large 2TB datastore setup on my MD3000i and 3 ESXi hosts connected to it to store their virtual disks. We ran about 10 VMs for about a week in this configuration with no real issues. However, after talking with our MD3000i installation technician he strongly advised against this setup. Since ESXi has no real clustering capability on it's own, you have 3 independant hosts accessing the same virtual disk, which could lead to a few problems (I/O issues, possible data corruption). Has anyone else tried this? Is it really that risky if each ESXi host is running seperate VMs with seperate vmdk's being stored on the same shared virtual disk?

Responses(2)

fox_inti

3 Posts

0

September 2nd, 2008 06:00

"This was sort of our plan for our virtualization setup. I had a large 2TB datastore setup on my MD3000i and 3 ESXi hosts connected to it to store their virtual disks. We ran about 10 VMs for about a week in this configuration with no real issues. However, after talking with our MD3000i installation technician he strongly advised against this setup. Since ESXi has no real clustering capability on it's own, you have 3 independant hosts accessing the same virtual disk, which could lead to a few problems (I/O issues, possible data corruption). Has anyone else tried this? Is it really that risky if each ESXi host is running seperate VMs with seperate vmdk's being stored on the same shared virtual disk?"

I think we have a missunderstanding here:
You have Vmware "Virtual Disks" (.vmdks) residing on a MD3000i "VirtualDisk" (LUN), these are different kind of Vdisks. A problem would be if you ESX servers would try to access the same .vmdk concurently, but it's not a problem to have different ESX servers accessing different .vmdks in one MD3000i VirtualDisk.

Btw.: To use Vmware Vmotion the .vmdk MUST reside in the same MD3000i VirtualDisk so the servers participating in the Vmotion Cluster have access to take over the VM.

Haxim

2 Posts

0

September 2nd, 2008 10:00

"it's not a problem to have different ESX servers accessing different .vmdks in one MD3000i VirtualDisk."

Ah, that's exactly what I was after. Thanks! Somewhat related tangent to VMotion. If I wanted to incorporate VMotion in the future, do I just need to keep the .vmdk's on the MD3000i, or do I need to keep the VM configuration files there as well?

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Multiple ESXi Hosts accessing the same Virtual Disk