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

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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.

Published by Sherbaz

Technology enthusiast Sherbaz is a Microsoft certified SQL Server Subject Matter Expert. He had fun automating day to day task to achieve management goals. He has extensive hands-on experience in high availability deployments and support with several years of industry experience performing SQL Server installations, configuration, maintenance, backups, performance tuning, Transactional & P2P replication, migration, high availability solutions (Always on, Failover Clustering, Logshipping and Mirroring) and Disaster recovery. Sherbaz also has basic hands-on experience in other DBMSs like MongoDB, Oracle 9i, 10g, Sybase and MySQL. 1 year on Mongodb, Oracle 9i & 10g. Completed M102 & M202 courses in MongoDB. Sherbaz spends his spare time with automation in electronics, embedded system circuits and IOT in his private lab at home. Also, he supports his customers and users at www.SplitExpense.in for issues with app, website or telegram chat bot @SplitExpenseBot https://t.me/SplitExpenseBot. @TheSherBot https://t.me/TheSherBot is another telegram chat bot, partially artificial intelligent, programmed and maintained by him on python and backend Mongodb database. Sherbaz always showed interest learning new technologies and to think out of the box bringing innovation in work. Some of his work is documented @ www.sherbaz.com. He is now busy learning 3D modeling software on his roadmap towards building his next hobby build, A 3D PRINTER. Subscribe to his youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/SherbazMohamed/

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