Sharing datastores between Vcenter servers

[jksnbco]

We are running vSphere and ESXi 6.7u3.  Cisco hosts.  Pure storage for our storage.

We currently have 1 existing vCenter server with several datastores shared between hosts.  We are setting up a new vCenter server for our VDI environment.

Is it recommended to have separate datastores per vCenter, or is it ok to share the datastores between vCenters?  The hosts are all in the same physical location.

[NathanosBlightc]

Hi

Although you can configure a shared LUN of a storage between two different vCenter servers, however, it's not recommended operation because of increasing total I/O on the same disks that are not seen and cannot be managed by a vCenter server, may strongly lead to decrease your overall performance while each vCenter server cannot be recognized it's because of another parallel multiple IOPS ...

[scott28tt]

Technically it may work, but practically in terms of admin and monitoring it wouldn’t be the best idea.

[ZibiM]

Hi

You can share datastores between 2 vCenters.

VDIs are bit special case, though:

1. You will have boot storms every morning

2. You will end up with far too many VMDK files per datastore

3. With Pure and their focus on dedupe and compression you should aim to have the volumes with as similar load as possible.

Better keep separate volumes for each environment and just create one or two shared volumes to speed up cross vcenter vmotion