How to manage cluster between VM and physical machine.

[frankind]

Hi Everyone,

My purpose is to create some File Server to share file to every Virtual Machine (Windows Only) instead of using map network drive (Because XP, 2003 does not support softlink via network).

First I create File.VMDK and add to second this to every Virtual Machine and I also found that the data does not sync so I found the answer that the data does not update because NTFS file system if want it to be update all time so it need to use Microsoft Cluster Service(MSCS)

So my environment are below:

DL380G4 : Install Windows 2003 OS to share disk or data (I'm not quite sure that MSCS share real disk or .VMDK)

DL380G5 and DL380G6 : Install VMWare ESXi 4.0 Update 2 and contains various Windows OS.

The question is:

1.How to set up DL380G4 to be share data or disk with MSCS?

2.How to set up Windows (VM) in client side to connect disk to DL380G4?

3.Could you suggest me another way to do it without MSCS because I don't know VMWare product may have solution for my case (vCenterServer?)

Thanks in advance.

[ChrisDearden]

Why not use DFS?

[idle-jam]

1) here you go http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_mscs.pdf 2) you can share if both the HBA support shares, but this defeat the purpose as the VM could not be vmotion and HA. it's better to have two VM clustered. DSF is one way to go 3) other tools you can look into neverfail, doubletake or even hp lefthand's network raid.

[opbz]

Let me get this straight.

All you want is to have some shared files to all your windows Vms? Literally a File Share server?

You  then thought of setting all your VMs as a cluster so that data could be synchronized? How many VMs do you plan on having access to the files?  Do you plan to set up a cluster with ALL of them? Not too sure if you can do it if all VMs are on one ESX server.  Do you plan to have your VMs access the same file at the same time? If you do then you need some sort of cluster and also some sort of clusterring aware file system. As you will get corruption using plain ntfs.  If you plan to create something like a homes directory then you can get by with plain file sharing.

Have to tell you your solution sounds pretty painfull and possibly expensive.

Honestly speaking you would be better of setting CIFS (smb) shares or NFS shares. You can configure your windows VMs to map them as part of login scripts.

Otherwise you can configure iscsi on your VMs and configure youir server to share out those drives as iscsi luns.

both of these will let you have access to files on the file server. Difference is on how the drives look to the VMs. with CIFS and NFS they see files.. with iscsi they will see the equivalent of a HD. If this will be visibvle to multiple VMs that HD needs to be formatted with a propper file system... NTFS will not do as its not cluster aware.

Personally I have created fully virtualized environments where file sharing was taken care of by a Linux server using samba. All my windows VMs could access the shares all the time.

[frankind]

Thanks for all respone,

1.I would like to use all windows machine access same data around 20VMs

2.It must access same times because many user use it and want it to be available all time.

3.I also read http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_mscs.pdf  and I found that it quite's complex to do for my environment.

4.I'm quite not sure that CIFS is like map drive? if yes i cannot do that because i need to do softlink(symbolic) link to link folder to drive C: (I ever use mklink tool to can be used for this one but it worked since windows Vista but the problem is XP and 2003 it cannot use) that Why I want to access same file as local drive not map drive or NFS.

So I still find and wait for solution.

Thanks in Advance