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justme00
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Nested ESXi 5 - long SCSI locks using BUS sharing

Hello all,

  I'm trying to improve the speed of my home lab . I have an all-in-one ESXi host :

  1 Physical Host with 3 internal disks. One disk is where ESXi is installed and where I created the 2 nested ESXi VMs .

   Now , till yesterday I was using a Storage appliance deployed on the physical host , where I attached as RDMs the local remaining 2 disks , and this disks were given via iSCSI to the 2 nested ESXi .The performance was not that great, but it was working ...

   I tried yesterday something else : I gave directly the 2 disks as RDMs to the 2 Nested ESXi using an LSI controller  and set the Bus sharing to Physical.

   Both nested ESXi hosts have access to the disks, I can vMotion , Storage Migration , everything like a "normal" shared storage ...

  I have to say that the performance has significantly improved , this is when it is working Smiley Happy . I have all kind of SCSI locks  , and all kind of errors/warning ( Long VMFS rsv time on 'Silver-Shared-01' (held for 289 msecs) )

  vMotion sometimes fails , same for the clones ... it is very instable Smiley Happy

   I know this is not even close to supported, but wanted to see if there is something else that I might try to fix this .If not, then I'll go back to a Storage apliance.

Thank you in advance.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

This configuration is not going to work.  You can't share the same physical storage among multiple ESXi VMs.

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justme00
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

  Well , this is an answer that I was expecting Smiley Happy , just said to give it a try. Actually , it *works* , but not as expected ... Right now I have even a Datastore Cluster , can do Storage Migration , vMotion , basically it "looks" & " feels" like normal storage . Until it goes haywire  ... and then all hell breaks loose Smiley Happy

Thank you for the confirmation .

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