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johnnva
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Accessing iSCSI from multiple VMs?

Hello,

We are running vCenter 6.0 with 5 hosts that are connected to an EqualLogic 6610 storage using iSCSI. Each host has 2 NICs dedicated to the isolated iSCSI network. We have some VMs running Windows 10 that need to access shared storage for an application that each VM is running. Currently they are using a file share on a physical server which can be slow as well as affect "regular" network performance. Would it be possible to create a shared disk on the iSCSI storage that each VM can access (similar to a shared folder) so that all of the traffic is contained within the vCenter/iSCSI environment?

Thanks,

John

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a_p_
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You may be able to access the same LUN from multiple VMs, but in your case this approach would most likely end up in a corrupted file system, because Windows 10 doesn't supports simultaneous access to the same LUN.

What may be an option to improve performance, is to setup a virtual file server with the required resources, configure this server as well as the Win10 VMs with virtual 10GBit/s NIC (vmxnet3), and run them on the same ESXi host (unless you have a physical 10GBit/ network).


André

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SupreetK
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You can use the option of Raw Device Mapping (RDM) and share it among multiple VMs if you want to present it from the vSphere environment. However, not recommended to share the disk between VMs if the application is not cluster aware.

About Raw Device Mapping

https://www.vmadmin.co.uk/resources/35-esxserver/58-rdmvm

Cheers,

Supreet

a_p_
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You may be able to access the same LUN from multiple VMs, but in your case this approach would most likely end up in a corrupted file system, because Windows 10 doesn't supports simultaneous access to the same LUN.

What may be an option to improve performance, is to setup a virtual file server with the required resources, configure this server as well as the Win10 VMs with virtual 10GBit/s NIC (vmxnet3), and run them on the same ESXi host (unless you have a physical 10GBit/ network).


André

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johnnva
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Thanks to you both for your responses. That is a good idea to move the VMs to 1 host and use the local storage with another file server on that host.

John

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