Best Practise to Share Disk Space to two VM´s

[thomas_mensch]

Hi,

I would like to share diskspace to two different VMs (XP). The VMs are in two separeted LANs.

What would be the best practise to do this.

Thats all on a ESX 3.0.1 Server

Thanks

[EGRAdmin]

Hi,

When you say share disk space do you mean 1 LUN both booting from?

Or

One LUN used as a data drive shared between the two?

If you want to have both systems booting off of the same LUN in ESX you shouldn't have any problems.

I have Windows 2003 paired with 2k and Windows 2003 and Red Hat Cent OS paired on another LUN.

All without any problems, just remember to save room for snapshots if you're doing them. I would assume XP would be the same.

If you're talking about sharing a LUN as a data drive I think you'll need some type of volume manager software because both hosts won't have correct locks on the drive during writes. I think Symantec has a Volume Manager that's free up to a certain number of volumes. Storage Foundation Suite I think is the paid version. Unless you carve the LUN into two seperate drives for each XP instance.

Hope that helps!

[thomas_mensch]

Hi,

I need one LUN used as a shared data drive.

My problem is that I need to transfer data from our production to our testing enviroment.

The two LANs must be seperated, it is not possible to have two NICs in one VM.

Thats a good hint with the Volume Manager, I´ll try and see if this is waht I need.

Thanks