djtomr941 wrote:Now that Oracle owns Vitual Box, is there any chance we can get shared disks similar to how VMWARE does it?
markea01 wrote:VMWare allows the virtual machines to share virtual disks, such that you can build a shared disk cluster across virtual machines (like Solaris Cluster) where the cluster framework manages arbitration between the writers, or Oracle RAC where the DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) provides the same function. Basically, we need to be able to allow the virtual hard disks to be simultaneously attached to multiple virtual machines.
If I try that today on version 3.1.6 r59351, I get an error when I try to start the second virtual machine:
"Failed to start the virtual machine <vmname>. Medium /Full/path/to/vdifile.vdi is locked for writing by another task.
Result Code:
VBOX_E_INVALID_OBJECT_STATE (0x80BB0007)"
One way might be to add another VBoxManage setextradata command that would "override" this checking for a specific VDI file. In that way, you could maintain the current behavior for the bulk of users who would never want to use this feature, but allow it for those who could use it. I was attempting to do just such a thing today (I added a bunch of virtual disks in the hope of running Oracle RAC between two virtual machines) but was disappointed to find that it is not allowed
Sasquatch wrote:This is perfectly normal, you can't use 1 hard drive in two systems simultaneously, there aren't the connections for it. You only have one IDE/SATA/SCSI port, how would you use that on more than 1 system?
I really don't see why everyone is so fed up with this 'simultaneous' access thing.
Sasquatch wrote:No matter how you explain it, having two VMs accessing one VDI at the same time is a disaster waiting to happen.
Sasquatch wrote:That which you describe is a fail-over system. That means that both systems constantly communicate with each other about access to the disk.
leoric wrote:I'm looking on migration from VmWare to VirtualBox. I had experimental Oracle RAC installation (2 Vmware nodes, 1 shared disk (OCFS2 formatted) for voting disk and OCR config. But I've read that feature request to implement shared disks in VirtualBox was declined. (...)
Sasquatch wrote:The average user (...) I'm not particularly waiting for topics of that kind here.
Sasquatch wrote:That which you describe is a fail-over system. That means that both systems constantly communicate with each other about access to the disk. This can indeed be set up in a VM, but I think it will cause more problems in the end than that it is useful. The average user might not think about it and happily starts two or more VMs with a shared disk and end up loosing the data on it. I'm not particularly waiting for topics of that kind here.
djtomr941 wrote:you could add some kind of warning message that says this disk is currently opened in another VM, are you sure you want to boot this VM up? ... Just thinking of safeguards
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