setup Three or More ESXi 3.5 Servers that Directly Connect to a Single ISCSI Volume on a SAN

[5498375982eddhf]

At work we have a SAN unit that only supports ISCSI connections. We would like to setup three or more ESXi 3.5 servers that directly connect to a single ISCSI volume on the SAN. There will be no server to act as a middle man to manage the ESXi connections or share out the ISCSI volume, each ESXi server will mount the ISCSI voilume on the SAN. The ISCSI volume will act as shared storage between the ESXi servers. Is this possible with the VMFS file sytem or will this result in data coruption. Thank you for your help.

[max_inglis]

Shared storage is the basis of a lot of features in VMware - if they are part of a cluster, they have to share storage, and the ESX software manages not opening the same files at the same time. You should be fine.

http://ITangst.blogspot.com

[Greyone]

iSCSI isn't a sharing mechanism - each server will think it has dedicated access and you'll end up with mush instead of data.

[Greyone]

Apologies, spoke too soon. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_VMFS

[weinstein5]

Yes it is as long as all 3+ ESX hosts have access to that LUN on the iSCSI - from one of these hosts you will need to add the storage and format it as a VMFS volume - once that is done simply rescan you iSCSI HBA and the storage will now be available to all ESX hosts - the VMFS file system is designed to support this sharing and the ESX hosts will be able to access files stored there with out overwriting each other - couple of things to keep in mind ESX only support LUN up to 2 TB in size -

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