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How to create a shared disk across two or more virtual machines setup on ESX 4.1 ?

My setup : 1. Created three virtual machines on ESX 4.1 2. All the virtual machines have RHEL5U3 installed.

Question : I wanted to create one disk of size 2GB and make it shared across above three virtual machines.

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Are you trying to create a template or do you want all three of your virtual machines to mount the same block level device (disk) simultaneously? – gravyface Jun 16 '11 at 12:45
Yes I wanted to mount same block level device on all the virtual machines (guest os) simultaneously. – manas k Jun 16 '11 at 12:49
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Big giant caveat. You need to disable caching on the vm's to get a consistent view of the shared disk.

disable caching! disk.locking = "FALSE" diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = "0"

This would still require a clustered file system.

While yes it is possible, numerous vmware support documents mention corruption as a recurring theme. They also recommend you use a RAW LUN instead of vmdk. I would use something like drbd to do this.

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