VMware Communities: Message List - Shared Disks and disk cache

Re: Shared Disks and disk cache

weinstein5 — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:16:48 GMT

The one most frequesntly used is MS Clustering Services -

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Re: Shared Disks and disk cache

bluedrake — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:12:06 GMT

Ahhh that sucks, do you know what clustering application I would have to use to do this?

Dont really want to have to use a shared drive via SMB/NFS as this will use the network card for data copies

Re: Shared Disks and disk cache

weinstein5 — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:25:08 GMT

I believe you will need cliustering software to have both O/Ses control the sharing of the disk - an O/S will not do this on its own - if you want to simply share the information I would give the disk to one of the VMs and use either SMB/NFS shares to allow the other VM access -

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Shared Disks and disk cache

bluedrake — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:22:25 GMT

Hi all

I have followed the steps below to attach a drive to two virtaul machines

vmkfstools -c 500G -d eagerzeroedthick -a lsilogic /vmfs/volumes/*/*/satashare.vmdk

Once that was done, i turned off the vitrual machines and attached the drive:

Attached it on a sperate scsi controler
Added it as a independent persistent drive
Changed the new scsi controler to a virtual device

When i powered on the virtual machines they could all see the disk but they could not share the information on the disk, the machines only saw the information originally put there by themselves.

I have read that i have to edit the following in the config file

scsi1.present = "TRUE" scsi1.sharedBus = "none" scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic" scsi1:0.present = "TRUE" scsi1:0.fileName = "D:\Virtual Machines\Shared Disk\SHARED-DISK.vmdk" to the following disk.locking = "FALSE" diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = "0" #scsi1 data storage scsi1.present = "TRUE" scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic" scsi1.sharedbus = "none" scsi1:0.present = "TRUE" scsi1:0.fileName = " D:\Virtual Machines\Shared Disk\SHARED-DISK.vmdk " scsi1:0.mode = "independent-persistent" scsi1:0.shared = "TRUE" scsi1:0.redo = "" Do i have to add the "diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize" line in as we are doing this for sql servers and dont want all the drives to have a 0 cache size. Thanks for the help in advance :)