Shared Storage Datastore

[porschenm]

I have 3 vPHERE ESX Standard licenses and one vCenter Foundation license, no vmotion, no HA.

Now we go a new iSCSI SAN (Dell Equallogic PS 6000).

We created 3 volumes, one for each ESX-server and connected them, created datastores an migrated virtual machines to the new storage.

Now my question ist, if we will be able to share one datastore for all esx-servers, without HA-license. We do not want to user vmotion or other HA-features, only want to connect one datastore to multiple ESX-servers.

If one ESX-server faults, we will be able to start the virtual machines on the other servers quickly.

Is this possible, or do we have to attach the ESX1 storrage to ESX2 when ESX1 is offline?

[paul_xtravirt]

multiple ESX hosts can connect to multiple datastores with a licence that provides you HA - that is fine.

In answer to quickly powering on VMs' yes is the simple answer, although you may have lock file on the datastores that would need to be cleaned up first.

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[AntonVZhbankov]

>Now my question ist, if we will be able to share one datastore for all esx-servers, without HA-license.

Yes.

>Is this possible, or do we have to attach the ESX1 storrage to ESX2 when ESX1 is offline?

You can do it even when all servers are online. VMFS was designed to provide simultaneous access from multiple hosts, and it does not require any license.

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[squigulum]

hi AntonVZhbankov,

You can do it even when all servers are online. VMFS was designed to provide simultaneous access from multiple hosts, and it does not require any license.

how do ESX-hosts synchronize access to the same SAN-datastore (if they don't 'know' each other because of missing HA/vMotion-license) or is this done with VMFS-structures stored 'inside' the VMFS-datastore ? how ? 8-)

does this configuration (multiple ESX-hosts, single SAN-datastore (VMFS)) need a central vSphere Server to 'connect' these ESX-hosts ?

TIA

Marc

[jussijaurola]

hi AntonVZhbankov,

You can do it even when all servers are online. VMFS was designed to provide simultaneous access from multiple hosts, and it does not require any license.

how do ESX-hosts synchronize access to the same SAN-datastore (if they don't 'know' each other because of missing HA/vMotion-license) or is this done with VMFS-structures stored 'inside' the VMFS-datastore ? how ? 8-)

It's feature of VMFS to lock files.

does this configuration (multiple ESX-hosts, single SAN-datastore (VMFS)) need a central vSphere Server to 'connect' these ESX-hosts ?

No it doesn't actually. You can share VMFS-volume with ESX-hosts without vCenter also.

[porschenm]

Thank you, that helped a lot.




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