How can I share a hard drive with multiple VMs?

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Tegan

New Member
Jan 31, 2011
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I've been considering installing Hyper-V server so that I can get everything running on one box (yes, I'm new to virtualization). The problem is that I want to have a shared storage drive / array for data files. Is this possible without using VHDs or virtual network shares? From my understanding, you can't share direct access to on drive / array across two VMs, but I'd love to find out that I'm wrong.
The reasons for doing this would be 1) to be able to pull and the data drive(s) in the event of a system crash, and 2) to minimize processor overhead (running an e3110).

My plan was to run Hyper-v Server with VMs for Server 2008 R2, and Windows 7.
An alternate option would possibly be ESXi with VMs for an Opensolaris file server, Server 2008 R2, and Windows 7, but that sounds like a lot of overhead. I do like the idea of ZFS instead of RAID...
Anyways, thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Passing a disk directly through to a VM is done specifically so the Hypervisor and other VMs do not share disk access. Pulling data off drives is not too much of an issue since you still can attach the drive to another system if need be, assuming you just passed a disk through. If you want two guest OSes to share one VM, .vhd's are probably the way to go.

To enhance performance (at the expense of waiting longer at setup) you can allocate disk space from the get-go and not use dynamically expanding vhd's.

With RAID-Z(2) and ZFS, I would highly suggest doing pass-through if possible, and only having the Solaris VM use the drives directly.

Another thought is that two Windows machines, and a ZFS machine will probably be a lot for an e3110. Personally, I do not like running ZFS systems with <8GB of RAM installed on an ESXi system, and the two 64-bit Windows installations need quite a bit of RAM themselves. Just some thoughts.