Sharing a VMFS Volume Across ESXi Hosts

As a cluster file system, VMFS lets multiple ESXi hosts access the same VMFS datastore concurrently. You can connect up to 32 hosts to a single VMFS volume.

Sharing a VMFS Volume Across Hosts

The image shows a single VMFS datastore being accessed by multiple servers.

To ensure that the same virtual machine is not accessed by multiple servers at the same time, VMFS provides on-disk locking.

Sharing the same VMFS volume across multiple hosts offers the following advantages:

■

You can use VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling and VMware High Availability.

You can distribute virtual machines across different physical servers. That means you run a mix of virtual machines on each server so that not all experience high demand in the same area at the same time. If a server fails, you can restart virtual machines on another physical server. In case of a failure, the on-disk lock for each virtual machine is released.

■

You can use vMotion to migrate running virtual machines from one physical server to another.

■

You can use VMware Consolidated Backup, which lets a proxy server, called VCB proxy, back up a snapshot of a virtual machine while the virtual machine is powered on and is reading and writing to its storage.