Disabling VMFS file locking

[alozanoff]

Hello,

I have an easy question. Is it possible to disable the file locking on VMFS? I haven't found any option on the Service Console.

We did this with NFS, we've just gotten a SAN and its a different story. We need to be able to power on the same VM on 2 ESX.

Thanks!

Alejandro

[weinstein5]

I do no think it is possible with VMFS-3 - Why do you need the same vm powred on two different ESX hosts?

[RParker]

First of all you can't power on 1 VM on 2 different hosts at the same time.

Secondly that's not VMFS locking, that's an in use locking.

Third you can't disable VMFS file locking, its a type of opportunistic locking that lets the OS lock files for various reasons, and the locking is in place to keep the OS from crashing or your VM's becoming unstable.

You want clustering, and there is plenty of documentation to explain how this is done both for Microsoft and VM Ware, it's complicated so you have to read carefully to ensure you fully understand how to use it.

[depping]

As fas as I know it's not possible, and if it was I would advice against it. Why would you want to do this? For clustering you could wait on the new feature " continous availability" to arrive or check MSClusteringServices.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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[alozanoff]

Because we use the images for QA testing, we have at least 350 images on the storage, on 1 ESX all we do is run an automated process on the images (it automatically reverts to snapshot and tests then powers off)

The other one is used for manual testing by people, we normally only write on this ESX but we need to be able to revert to a snapshot on both ESX at the same time, this is all in separated networks.

I don't care about stability, since we never write to disk (other than the swap file, which i can put somewhere else), or at least we only do rarely and then take another snapshot, we actually never "power on" the images, its all revert to snapshot and power off, we do this without a problem with NFS removing the locking mechanism it implements. As far as i know in this case where im running iSCSI with a VMFS filesystem, the locking of files is done by VMFS, isn't it?

I need to find away to do this, it's an iSCSI show stoper for me, the only solution would be to mount the volume on a machine and then export it with NFS... Which sucks.

Thanks for the answers.

[weinstein5]

Have you thought using Lab Manager? It will allow you to create multiple VMs off the same base image and it will be stable -

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Well to state up front, it is impossible to disable LUN locking within the VMware ESX host as well as file locking. If you share a VMFS between multiple hosts you will have locking. LUN Locking or SCSI-2 Reservations occur whenever the VMFS metadata changes: create snapshots, revert snapshots, power on a VM and power off a VM, etc.

VMDK locks occur from within the Guest OS as well as within the ESX server. No way to disable this.

I would suggest another testing method. Lab Manager is one, but perhaps what you need is a way to 'deploy' one of your 350 VMs to another storage location, perhaps local storage. Run your tests. Then delete the VM. This way your 350 are static and your test VMs are created on need. Lab Manager does this, but you can also script it using one of the VI SDK options.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[alozanoff]

Thanks for your answer, copying the VM to local storage before every test could be... But it would really slow the process. I think I'm just gonna ext3 the storage, mount it through ISCSI and export it to the ESX hosts... It wont be fast either, but at least I wont have to do any scripting or LabManager...

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Well that will not really work either. iSCSI shared LUNs uses VMFS as the filesystem not ext3. If you want to use ext3 then you are stuck with NFS.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization