I was just rebuilding my “ESX in a box” setup. I wanted to install an iSCSI Virtual San Appliance but why should I? Your answer probably is: well because you need shared storage to do a VMotion / HA / DRS etc. Yes you are completely right I do need shared storage to have these capabilities, but there’s no need for an iSCSI VSA or NFS appliance for that matter.
A while ago Bouke G. of Jume wrote a nice blog on how to set up shared storage without a SAN appliance. In short you just create an additional disk(scsi id 1:0) on the first ESX VM. Close down VMware Workstation and edit your .vmx file. I would suggest a copy and paste of the following lines and remove the duplicate lines. (scsi1:0.filename etc)
scsi1.present = “TRUE”
scsi1.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
scsi1.sharedBus = “VIRTUAL”
scsi1:0.present = “TRUE”
scsi1:0.fileName = “D:\Virtual Machines\shared_disk.vmdk”
scsi1:0.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi1:0.redo = “”disk.locking = “FALSE”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0″
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = “0″
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = “0″
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = “4096″
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = “0″
Now copy the correct .vmx entries to the second ESX VM’s .vmx file and just boot them up. It’s as simple as that. Yes I know setting up iSCSI isn’t difficult but this will save you precious memory, especially when running this as a demo kit on your laptop!
One reason to setup a virtual SAN is to test Site Recovery Manager. This is because it only works with a known 3th party replication adapater like Netapp. I wrote a document about it with a setup of the Netapp simulator@ http://www.tendam.info
The fun is that you can use this simulator to supply esx with an iscsi lun, a raw lun or NFS and test storage migration, vmotion and other stuff. It just works like a real netapp appliance.
Thanks for this tip, this is much easier to sertup and test shared storage options!