Thursday, August 18, 2005

Clustering with VMWare 5.x...

Contrary to most things you'll read, it actualy is possible to share disks in VMWare 5.x. So now you don't have to have 3 VM's with one being an iSCSI host to do clustering. The trick is to create your primary OS disks as IDE drives, use vdiskmanager to create a SCSI based disk for the quorum, then add the following lines to the .vmx files of the servers you want to cluster:

disk.locking=FALSE
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "..\wherever_disk_is_stored\QUORUM.vmdk"
scsi0:0.redo = ""
scsi0:0.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi0:0.deviceType = "disk"


Then follow the normal cluster build process. The cluster service will ensure you don't get both nodes trying to write to disk at once.