Snapshot of VM with multiple virtual disks

[tom_mccarthy_07]

I have several VM's that are running clusters. These VM's have 4 hard disks and 2 NIC's.I found that I cannot take a snapshot of these servers. The option is grayed out. The disks are NOT set to Independent, persistent, etc.. I have not found anything that deals with this. I am running ESX 3.02 on IBM Hardware. I thank you for any input here. Thanks.

[weinstein5]

What type of vm clustering are you doing? Sanpshots of RDM and Raw Disks is not supported - From Page 249 of http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_admin_guide.pdf - "NOTE Snapshots of raw disks, RDM physical mode disks, and independent disks are not supported." - so if you are trying to snapshot cluster-across-boxes it is not supported -

[tom_mccarthy_07]

These are 2 W2K3 Enterprise R2 servers. The MS Clustering is configured with an E:/, F:/ & Q:/ Data, Log and Quorum drives (VMDK Virtual Disks on the SAN). The SAN contains several arrays and the VM's are on 1 aray and the VMDK drives are on a seperate array. They are NOT independent disks. I was hoping to take a snapshot after the Websphere install so I have a revesion point. Thank you for the info.

[mitchellm3]

Where is the c/d drive located? If I remember correctly, in order to run an MSCS cluster on VMware, the OS .vmdk must be located on the ESX servers local storage. I this how you are configured? If so, maybe that might have something to do with it.

shot in the dark.

[tom_mccarthy_07]

I ve the System (C:/) and Applation (D:/) drives located on a seperate array in the SAN. The MSCS is functioning fine. the failover works, etc.. I just cannot take a snapshot of this type of configuration. Thanks for the idea though.

[trojanjo]

You have set the SCSI adapters to share the vmdk's though right? I don't have exact documentation but intuitively to me that sounds like a problem with the way snapshots work.

Somehow VirtualCenter would need to be aware to snapshot both (or all) cluster nodes at once, having them all start to write to the delta file.

[tom_mccarthy_07]

This is not supported. Be nice if it was.