Cross-DMZ vmdk sharing. Is this possible?

[djaquays]

I've tried researching this before posting here, but most information is from 2005 or earlier (and isn't specifically what I want to do), so I'm not sure if things have changed.

Currently, we have a Windows XP VM in our LAN cluster that builds a dynamic website every 2 hours and then FTPs the entire thing, which can end up being a few GB worth of data, to a SLES10 web server in our DMZ. This, obviously, wastes time/bandwidth and requires additional exceptions in our DMZ-LAN firewall. What would make more sense to me, is to create a VMDK that is 'owned' by the XP guest, on our netapp nfs exports, and the site is built directly on that disk. The SLES10 guest could then connect to that VMDK as read-only (through fstab) and serve the site from there.

[AntonVZhbankov]

First of all, I do not know any cluster FS that supports both Windows and Linux.

I suppose, you can have Samba on your web-server, so XP will build site directly on webserver. But it's not better than FTP.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[djaquays]

That's what I was afraid the answer would be. I was hoping for a solution below the guest layer.

[AntonVZhbankov]

Forget about VMware. Let's assume all machines are physical - can you imagine how to perform this task?

VMware has nothing special in this case, ESX will provide you with all the tools to be able to do the same as with physical machines.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[djaquays]

I understand how things work with physical hosts, exactly like we're doing now. I was hoping VMWare did provide something special in this case, as it simply makes sense from a virtualization stand-point. You can significantly reduce your data footprint and network traffic if storage gets shared in the virtualization layer. Of course, I really don't know enough about filesystems to know how file listing/lookups work and if the OS that doesn't do the writing would find the new/changed files.

Anyway, at this point that's all irrelevant, apparently, and I'll just continue to do what I've been doing. Thanks for the reply.

[AntonVZhbankov]

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru