Shared SAN Storage between different VC´s

[joergriether]

Hello,

today i installed the very first 3.5 Server to our datacenter. I did a very fresh install of a new esx 3.5 and also of a very new vc server. NOW: There is an iSCSI SAN (Equallogic) on which all VM´s are stored. I expanded the SAN and created very fresh LUNs which I assigned using the newly created esx 3.5 Server so I could fornat them with vmfs 3.31 instead of 3.21. very well so far. NOW: I tried to map these new luns (which are visible to the esx35 (which is located in the new VC) to the old ESX 3.0.2 machines. Works all very well.

My question is now: Is this scenario dangerous because i now share luns between different Virtual Centers AND between different Versions of ESX or is this scenraio quite harmless and OK?

best regards

Joerg

[kastlr · Accepted solution]

This isn't critical.

VC is used to manage your ESX Servers only, it doesn't access or control the usage of the shared SAN storage.

And the ESX Servers itself are able to share SAN storage between 3.0.x and 3.5 as this is usually required when you'll upgrade your existing 3.0.x servers to 3.5.