concurrent access ?

Yes concurrent access!
As a background my friend did that because on other site, he was able to share LUNS on ESX host - but I think VMFS is a concurrent FS.

Sure it's possible, but it's not recommended within Windows.

You can add multiple hosts to a Storage Group, but you can easily end up with data corruption unless the OS is smart enough to handle concurrent access.

The "recommended" configuration to share LUNs is with Clustering. Even with MSCS, only one host can have physical access to a single LUN.

With VM, ESX controls access to the LUN so you can assign many hosts to a single storage group or you can assign the same LUN to multiple Storage Groups with the same effect.

Well in windows you don't want to share them out that that because it is a potential data loss like you experienced. In VMware that is a different story. In vmware you can actually divide up a LUN into serveral different LUNS within VMFS to to VM file locking and scsi reserves.

Of course, you could put them in a cluster resource.

Message was edited by:
woodsta