Application clustering solutions for vSAN
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Application clustering solutions for vSAN

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Article ID: 326768

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

This KB provides information about vSAN and its supportability for Application Clustering Solutions using native shared VMDKs or vSAN iSCSI Targets.

Solutions are:

  • Microsoft Always ON Availability Groups
  • Microsoft Failover Clustering Instance (FCI)
  • Microsoft File Services
  • Microsoft Distributed File System Replication DFS-R
  • Microsoft File Server Failover clustering
  • Microsoft Windows 2016 Storage Replica (SR)
  • Microsoft Exchange
  • Oracle RAC


Symptoms:

Customer investigating the following options:

  • Shared vmdks between VMs to share files;
  • vSAN iSCSI Target for Application Clustering Solutions 
  • Application Clustering Solutions


Environment

VMware vSAN 6.x
VMware vSAN 7.0.x

Cause

1. As occurs with VMFS and NFS datastores, VMware vSAN prevents multiple virtual machines from opening the same virtual disk (VMDK) in read-write mode. This is to protect the data stored on the virtual disk from corruption caused by multiple writers on the non-cluster-aware filesystems used by most guest OSes. vSphere has two ways to share vmdks:

Both options remove vSphere locking on the vmdks and the VMs can write at the same time to the same files. Customers must leverage cluster-aware filesystems that have distributed write (multi-writer) capability or else there could be data corruption.

2. Also, VMware vSAN iSCSI targets can be used to provide SCSI-3 locking and LUNs required for a number of clustered applications.
For more information regarding SCSI-3 locking

Resolution

 



Additional Information

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