> > > > My understanding is that if you wanted to use MS Cluster Server, you'd need > to use a LUN as an RDM for the quorum drive. VMDK files are locked when > open, so they can't typically be shared. VMware's Fault Tolerance gets > around this somehow, and I have a suspicion that their Lab Manager product > does as well. > > Right, but again, we're talking about storing virtual machines, not RDM's. Using MSCS on top of VMware rarely makes any sense, and MS is doing their damnedest to make it as painful as possible for those that try anyways. There's nothing stopping you from putting your virtual machine on an NFS datastore, and mounting a LUN directly to the guest OS with a software iSCSI client and cutting out the middleman and bypassing the RDM entirely... which just adds yet another headache when it comes to things like SRM and vmotion.
> I don't think you can use VMware's built-in multipathing with NFS. Maybe > it's possible, it doesn't look that way but I'm not going to verify it one > way or the other. There are probably better/alternative ways to achieve the > same thing with NFS. > You can achieve the same thing with a little bit of forethought on your network design. No, ALUA is not compatible with NFS, it is a block protocol feature. Then again, ALUA is also not compatible with the MSCS example you listed above. > The new VAAI stuff that VMware announced with vSphere 4.1 does not support > NFS (yet), it only works with storage servers that implement the requires > commands. > > VAAI is an attempt to give block more NFS-like features (for instance, finer-grained locking which already exists in NFS by default). The "features" are basically useless in an NFS environment on intelligent storage. The locked LUN thing has happened to me once. I've had more trouble with > thin provisioning and negligence leading to a totally-full VMFS, which is > irritating to recover from, and moved/restored luns needing VMFS > resignaturing, which is also irritating. > > I don't want to argue with you about the other stuff. > > Which is why block with vmware blows :) --Tim
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