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Thread: VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

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    VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

    I'm trying to mimick a lab setup on my laptop for some HA testing.

    In a normal environment, there'd be Server A and Server B. Both servers have a FC HBA and connect to some shared storage (simple SAN). Both servers boot from their own local HDDs, but SAN zoning allows them to access the same additional LUNs simultaneously as they run a distributed file system.

    Can I replicate this with a couple of VMs ? I've tried setting it up, but as I feared, once one machine has loaded a SCSI vmdk, the other machine won't start with the same vmdk in the config as it's locked by the first. This isn't the boot disk of course, just a second disk I need to share.

    Is there a way around this or can I fudge it somehow?

    Ta muchly

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    Re: VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

    Ok so you are trying to replicate a windows cluster in workstation ?

    soudns like its doable , but will need a bit of a hack

    http://crosbysite.blogspot.com/2007/...station-6.html
    http://edu-naka.blogspot.com/2010/01...rkstation.html
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    Re: VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

    Hmm. Thanks for that

    I'll have a play. Not sure if it'll work, but will report back (using player, not full workstation, etc).

    Cheers

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    Re: VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

    Well, no go.
    I've got as far as being able to see the LUNs on both nodes at the same time, but I cannot get the distributed file system mounting the disks / filesystem, it times out. So I guess the latency tolerances are too tight for what VM will allow using the local SCSI bus mentioned above.

    I did read that for WS2008R2 you need SCSI3 type shared disks and when using VMware, that can only be achieved using iSCSI.

    So I'll give that a go, but it's somewhat more involved getting it up and running!

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    Re: VMware Player question: Sharing disks amongst VMs simultaneously

    Create a freenas VM. Use that for iSCSI. It's pretty much a wizard type setup provided you understand a little bit of how iSCSI works.
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