Quick Question about esx 3.5 and openfiler

[CoreyIT]

i would like to configure two esx hosts to point to the same iscsi share being served from openfiler. I know in windows you cannot point two hosts to the same iscsi share without clustering or one OS will not see the changes made by the other and vise versa. Does vmfs handle the share differently so both hosts can see and interact with the same data without conflicts? I only one have shot at setting it up since we have a lot of production machines running on these two hosts and I want to get it right the first time or else if I make a change after the fact you are requested to restart the ESX host before concurrent changes will take effect.

Thanks

[Lightbulb · Accepted solution]

VMFS is a clustered file system so if you are attaching th the ISCSI LUN to create a datastore for use by the hosts you will have no problem.

[CoreyIT]

perfect, thanks. working as expected.

[TomHowarth]

Thread moved to the ESX 35. Forum

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

[BUGCHK]

> you will have no problem

That is true as long as the iSCSI target does implement SCSI RESERVE/RELEASE properly, which is used by ESX to serialize metadata changes. In the past we've had reports about VMFS corruptions due to bad implementations - I can't comment about openfiler.