Share VMDK between 2 VMs running on different AZ (part of Stretched Cluster)

[nareshsharma]

Hello,

This is regarding Microsoft Failover Cluster on VMs running on VMC on AWS. I see that it is possible to share VMDK between 2 VMs running in same local VMware Cluster on VMC on AWS. However, I haven't see any link which shows if we can share virtual disks between 2 VMs running on VMC Stretched Cluster (In 2 different Availability Zones). For example, if I have Stretched Cluster deployed across two Availability zones (pls see following link) and one of the VM is running on AZ-1 and second VM is running on AZ-2, and I want to provision Microsoft Failover Cluster between these 2 VMs with shared VMDK. Could someone help if this is possible and supported by VMware on VMC on AWS?

Stretched Cluster on VMC:

https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/vmc-arch/docs/compute/vmc-aws-stretched-cluster#section1'

Thanks

NS

[Pablo_Cruces_]

Hi @nareshsharma.

Nice to meet you, i am VMware Staff Customer Success Architect for Muti-Cloud solutions and i will help you with the WSFC topic.

The answer is yes, it is supported.

There is a nice blog post with the title "Deploying a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) in the Supported Configuration on VMware Cloud on AWS and vSAN" and will help you to achieve the right configuration. A stretched cluster SDDC uses vSAN synchronous replication for VMDKs, including shared VMDKs using cross-AZ network connection, so you need to evaluate a possible performance impact on applications deployed o top of a WSFC.

This post will be very soon updated (this week, hopefully today/tomorrow) to reflect this configuration is also supported on VMware Cloud on AWS, link:  https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2021/01/wsfc-validation-vmware-vmc.html

Also. we generally refer to the on-premises documentation that you can find in this post "WSFC with Native Shared Disks on vSAN 6.7U3 Stretched Clusters",  link:https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2019/10/09/wsfc-stretched-clusters/

Last but not least, are you planing to migrate WSFC workloads to the cloud or deploy them from the scratch?  

Hope this help!

Regards,

[nareshsharma]

Thanks Pablo for the details and confirmation on cross-site shared VMDK. There will be both cases (migration and new build).

Similar to Windows Failover Cluster, just also wanted to check if Red Hat “High Availability Cluster” is also supported with shared VMDKs on Stretched Cluster across 2 AZs in VMC on AWS?

Thanks