VMWARE VCB and ESX

[Gerry_Dames]

How do these servers share disks? It says to setup disk storage device on san so both can access. We don't normally have two servers accessing same disks.

[Rakesh_Khandelw]

To achieve this you need to include both hosts with storage in SAN zoning. Sharing doesn't mean both hosts are writing on same disks. It's for read only purpose on other host.

[Nick_F1]

They way I've done it is to have two storage groups, one with all the ESX servers in and the other with only the VCB server in. Then I add the LUNs used for VMFS to both the ESX and VCB storage groups and also add a LUN for the snapshot area only to the VCB server group. It's also critical you disable automount on the Windows VCB server before you add the VMFS LUNs to it's storage group else it will discover the new disks and trash them. As long as they're in the storage group (and zoned properly etc.) the VCB server will use them even though they don't show up in device manager/disk management.

You could just add the VCB server into the ESX server storage group but then the ESX servers would have visibility of the VCB snapshot area which could be confusing.