Can I have iSCSI shared storage used by both VMWare and Hyper-V
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Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:44 PM
I currently have 3 ESXi VMware hosts that all are attached to a QNAP shared storage using iSCSI. I am trying to insert a new 2012 Hyper-V server into the mix and want to allow it to use the same shared storage. I have the initiator setup on the Hyper-V machine and can see the shared disks on the QNAP but they are offline. When I go to bring one online I get the warning: "If this disk is already online on another server, bring the disk online on this server can cause data loss. Are you sure..." So my question is, should I be doing this at all? Will VMWare and HyperV not play nice together on shared storage? I know very little about HyperV so I am not sure if it is going to try to do something to the disks and kill my VMWare servers that run off of this shared storage.
Thanks
All Replies
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Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:04 PMI think ( not sure) that this cannot be done. Hyper V sees teh disk that is being presented to it through Iscsi but the disk format is different for both systems. HyperV is NTFS or NFS and vmware is EXT5.
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Thursday, November 29, 2012 10:01 PM You can certainly use the same iscsi storage device, but not the same shared disks. You would want separate disks for your Hyper-V hosts.
- Proposed As Answer by Ted Archer [MSFT] Thursday, November 29, 2012 10:01 PM
- Marked As Answer by cwhicks3 Friday, November 30, 2012 8:38 PM
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Friday, November 30, 2012 7:30 PM
Good thing you stopped when you saw that message. You could have very easily corrupted the data on the disks if you had allowed the access. Even if the two systems were exactly the same, without some sort of software to ensure controlled access to the shared storage, you can corrupt the disks. In Windows case, it is Failover Cluster software. Without that, even two Windows systems would corrupt the data because there is nothing acting as a 'traffic cop' to ensure one host doesn't write over data written by the other host. ESX has similar software to ensure sharing is done properly. But ESX doesn't talk to Windows and Windows doesn't talk to ESX to ensure controlled access.
But, as Ted says, it is no problem to share the array. Just don't try sharing the same LUNs.
tim
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Friday, November 30, 2012 7:48 PM
I think ( not sure) that this cannot be done. Hyper V sees teh disk that is being presented to it through Iscsi but the disk format is different for both systems. HyperV is NTFS or NFS and vmware is EXT5.
NFS don't have any on-disk layout as it's pure network redirector. In a nutshell: NFS can be backended with NTFS, EXT3, WAFL or whatever but not with NFS itself.
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Friday, November 30, 2012 7:57 PM
I currently have 3 ESXi VMware hosts that all are attached to a QNAP shared storage using iSCSI. I am trying to insert a new 2012 Hyper-V server into the mix and want to allow it to use the same shared storage. I have the initiator setup on the Hyper-V machine and can see the shared disks on the QNAP but they are offline. When I go to bring one online I get the warning: "If this disk is already online on another server, bring the disk online on this server can cause data loss. Are you sure..." So my question is, should I be doing this at all? Will VMWare and HyperV not play nice together on shared storage? I know very little about HyperV so I am not sure if it is going to try to do something to the disks and kill my VMWare servers that run off of this shared storage.
Thanks
Not doable. The best approach woud be having SMB 3.0 and NFSv4 shares on the same volume but QNAP cannot do SMB 3.0 now. And MS I think will never support NFS for this scenario (the same about SMB and VMware). Having block-level access assumes you again need to have the same file system. Hyper-V is NTFS and VMware is EXTxxx. No way...
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