Tip: Adding Shared Disk to build a Failover Cluster inside VMware

If you wanna add a shared disk to the two nodes of a cluster to be built inside a VMware, Follow below steps.

  1. If your VMware is pretty Old, Then shutdown both the virtual machines to be configured as cluster.
  2. Then from inside VMware virtual center, right click one of the virtual machine and select ‘edit settings’.
  3. Create one SCSI control with sharing allowed among multiple virtual machines.
  4. Now click on Add and select Hard Disk.
  5. Select to create new virtual disk, provide required size, thin provisioning unchecked and to store with the virtual machine. And in advanced section, select the value for Virtual node (1:x, where 1:0 was selected as virtual node in step 3 and the x can have any value which is unoccupied. Since this SCSI control was newly created, all the nodes will be vacant. So here x can have any value between 0 and 15). Complete the wizard and now you have disk created and mapped to one virtual machine.
  6. Right click the same virtual machine once again and choose ‘edit settings’. And then click on the Hard Disk we just added. Now in a box at the right top corner, you will get the disk file location and name.
  7. Next use the tool putty (Let me know if you would like to know what putty is) and connect with the ESX host where the two virtual machines are located and also the disk we created in step 5 will be located.
  8. Using basic linux commands, navigate and find the Disk file and run below command to make the Disk file Zeroed (All bits on that disk are reset in this process).
    • vmkfstools -w /filepath/filename.vmdk

  9. Go back to the VMware virtual center,  right click the next virtual machine and choose ‘edit settings’.
  10. Click on add and then Hard Disk. But this time select to use an existing virtual disk. And then provide the path to the disk created in step 3 and then zeroed in step 8. The rest of the options are similar to Step 5.
  11. Now you have a disk shared between two Virtual machines in VMware.

Try powering on each virtual machine one by one. Hope this helped.

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