Best way to share data between ESXi VMs

[vcth4nh]

The data can be exe files, lots of code, images, videos, documents, etc.

I used to use an SMB share with my data stored on a NAS VM, but it raised quite a few problems like network bottle neck, security alert, etc.

Here is what I want to achieve:

• Share work data between Windows ESXi VMs.
• Multiple machines can read/write data (worst case is at the same time)
• Utilize the highest speed of the SSD

Is there a more efficient way to achieve this?
I was thinking of:

1. Share VMDK disk with multiple VMs (Adding VMDK Disk Across ESXi Guest Machines - OES Cluster Services Implementation Guide for VMware (microfocus.com) )
2. Or passthrough the disk to a Windows machine, and SMB shares it with other machines

Thank you all!

 

[ano]

nfs?

 

[gea]

Disk Sharing of vmdk is critical. While ESXi can do this, the guest VMs need to be cluster aware or a damaged filesystem is the result on concurrent access. Best way to share data between VMs are SMB shares either from one of the Windows guests or from a (ZFS) storage VM on ESXi.

I use OmniOS (free Solaris fork) to provide ZFS storage for ESXi. It has quite the lowest resource need of any ZFS VM (up from 2GB, more is faster) and provide zero config kernelbased NFS and SMB (just set to on). I share filesystems via NFS (for ESXi VMs) and SMB (for easy VM backup/clone/move) and ZFS snaps=Windows previous versions). You can try my ready to use ESXi template with a web-gui included, napp-it // webbased ZFS NAS/SAN appliance for OmniOS, OpenIndiana and Solaris : Downloads