I want to store media assets and such that can be accessed by multiple virtual machines as a windows drive path. The question is can I (and should I):
A) Have a physical hard drive partitioned to NTFS and share access to all the virtual machines.
-or-
B) Have a virtual hard drive created by VMWare (so the physical partition is VMFS but virtual one would be NTFS) and share access to all the virtual machines.
Which is possible and/or best?
If something ever 'goes wrong' would I be better off having a native file system I could just connect to using most any bootable OS?
Best Answer
Narrowly speaking, at this time mounting the same NTFS-formatted partition on multiple servers is not supported. The only exception to this is when the NTFS partition is hosting HyperV virtual disks, which is not what you're doing. The problem comes down to how to mediate locking. The HyperV MSCS role includes a layer for doing it, essentially by electing a single MSCS node to be the metadata server and all metadata updates are processed through that node.
Looking at your problem, need the ability to access the same data-store of media files from multiple servers, it looks like a file-level sharing solution will fit your needs such as a dedicated Windows server for storage. If the web-servers and the media-store are all in the same AD Domain it is perfectly possible to configure the web-services to have access to the file-store over the network.