Shared virtual disks…
May 11th, 2007I have been working on a proof of concept for a virtualised clusterd file system and needed the ability to share several virtual disks.
The virtualisation platform I have been using is VMware Server and on the guest start-up it locks the virtual disks so it aint going to happen! After searching and much reviewing the VMware documentation I found the following configuration options that can be applied to the VMX configuration file for a given VM.
The following options allow you to share disks between one or more VM’s:
disk.locking = “false”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0″
scsi0.sharedBus = “virtual”
scsi0:1.present = “TRUE”
scsi0:1.fileName = “pathToSharedDisk.vmdk”
scsi0:1.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi0:1.redo = “”
Depending on the configuration you have you may need to change scsi0 to the bus id that your disks reside on and :1 for the scsi id and the fileName parameter to the path of your shared disks.
While setting this shared disk you need to ensure your using a cluster aware file system otherwise there is bound to be data corruption.
Good luck!