ESXi 4.0 and Shared drive for ORacle RAC issue.

[Halfcreed]

We set up an Oracle RAC system with shared drives about a month ago, but it got corrupted last week.

We are using ESXi 4.0(171494) and I have created two seperate VMs with Windows 2003 Server.

I have created several virtual hard drives and created a seperate directory on the Datastore and moved the virtual drives into that folder.

I have edited the VM settings to point the the virtual hard drives in the new datastore folder.

I have set the disk.Locking= "FALSE", but when I try to startup the second machine, I get an error message "Unable to access a file since it is locked.<unspecified filename>".

I can start each VM and it sees the hard drives on the shared datastore.

[dquintana]

Hello Half, can you clarify more the movement of the virtual drivers?

____________________________

Ing. Diego Quintana

Wetcom Group

www.wetcom.com.ar

My Virtualization blog

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|http://www.wetcom.com.ar/content/author/dquintana/]

[Halfcreed]

Since I can't create the extra virtual by navigating to a different folder, I have to create the drives in one of the datastore folder.

I then edit the settings to remove the drives and move them to the other folder on the datastore.

I then edit the settings for both VMs to point to the new datastore folder.

[dquintana]

Do you have .lck files?

____________________________

Ing. Diego Quintana

VCP-VAC-VTSP-VSP

Wetcom Group

Buenos Aires - Argentina

www.wetcom.com.ar

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Grupo de Virtualizacion en español de Linkedin

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[Halfcreed]

No, there are no .lck files in any of the folders.

[MollyF]

Does anyone know the exact values that must be set in the vmx file in order to create shared disks between two VMs? I am only interested in ESX/ESXi 4.0. I want this in order to build a test RHEL Oracle RAC environment. I know Oracle do not support RAC on vmware and I can live with that. One would think VMware documents would document how to do this. Thanks

[depping]

Why don't you use an RDM?

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCDX

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[MollyF]

I am building a test environment using NFS storage. I dont want to use RDMS. I want to use shared vmdk files. I would expect that ESX/ESXI 4.0 supports shared vmdks but I dont know the exact entries for the vmx file. FWIW - i have done this in the past on VMware Workstation 5. Now on ESXi 4.0

[kjb007]

Two things you need to do to start. You need to make sure that the vmdk you create, is set to a scsi id that is not on SCSI controller 0. You can change this in the VM properties, and select any ID in the 1:X, 2:x, or 3:X range. This will create a new controller. When that controller is added, the 2nd thing you need to do is to set the controller bus sharing mode to either virtual (if you are creating the vm's on the same host), or to physical (if your vm's will span hosts).

-KjB

[MollyF]

Thanks, do you have the exact values that would go in the vmx file? I will give this a try later.

[kjb007]

If you're using ESXI, I would suggest you work through the vSphere client. It will you avoid making simple mistakes in your VMX that can cause your vm config to go into an invalid state. The two things mentioned above are done very quickly through the client.

-KjB

[MollyF]

Ok thank you, I will give that a try later and let you know how it goes..

[MollyF]

KjB

I created the first additional hard disk on SCSI controller 1. So far so good. However, when I click on the new controller in Edit Settings the SCSI Bus Sharing section that offers None, Virtual and Physical are greyed out. I cannot change them. Any ideas?

[kjb007]

The ony time that section should be greyed out is if the vm is powered on, so the vm will need to be down to make this change.

-KjB

[MollyF]

Thanks very much KjB for that. My disks are now shared, partitioned and visible on both my RHEL VMs. I will press on with the Oracle RAC install now. Thank you again.