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!
Tomas says
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!
Duncan Epping says
Yes I know, but I hardly ever do that… I am writing a blog article on that subject by the way…
Hany says
Duncan, i can’t start telling you how useful this is to save me some RAM in my VMworkstation running the ESX cluster. Thank you very much!
I administer an enterprise farm of ESX servers, but using the ESX in a box testing environment provides me with easy and fast way to do crazy stuff that i can’t dare to do it even on my ESX labs.
By the way, since you are working for VMware, does this whole ESX-in-a-box scenario violate any VMware terms, considering that I’m using VMware evaluation licenses. The reason i ask is that i intend to do a video tutorials using my VMworstation lab, and then publish them online and it will be mentioned that the ESX servers are running in VMware Workstation.
Tomas, incredibly useful guide as well for SRM!
tuong says
here is the senarios
WK 6.5
2 EsX 2.3 VM
share disk
enable HA and DRS
create test VM
when try to power on VM to teset Vmotion ERROr ( insufficent resourse to satisfy configured failover level for HA)
please help.
thanks
Eugene says
can you use this technique to share a VMDK on a shared data store between 2 VMs sitting on 2 ESX physical hosts?
Also, another question. Is there a way do disable locking per vmdk rather than the whole VM (VMX)?
Ilkin says
Sadly this did not work for ESX 5.0 🙁