Are VMware VMDK disk images a supported shared storage method in Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Cluster?

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 with the High Availability or Resilient Storage Add On
• All nodes in the cluster run on a VMWare vSphere / ESXi platform
• Virtual shared storage presented to nodes from a VMWare VMDK disk image

Issue

• Is VMFS backed VMDK disk images on VMWare guests supported by Red Hat Support for clustered filesystems such as GFS2?
• Can I use VMDK disks with the multi-writer flag for GFS2?
• Can I use VMDK disks as shared storage for my cluster?
• I have 2 VMs running on VMware ESX Server, both connected through VCenter, need to know your best recommendation on configuring shared filesystem GFS on VMs?
• Can I use clvm clustered LVM for managing shared storage on VMs running on VMware Hypervisor and part of High Availability Cluster?
• Is VMware "Clustered VMDK" use supported in a pacemaker cluster?

Resolution

There are 2 types of shared storage used by VMware VMDK:

• A shared VMware VMDK with the multi-writer option enabled which is supported on RHEL 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Support for deploying shared storage on a VMDK device with the multi-writer option enabled is available in cman-2.0.115-109.el5 or later in RHEL 5, cman-3.0.12.1-49.el6 or later in RHEL 6, and all releases of the High Availability Pacemaker Add On for RHEL 7. For more information on enabling the multi-writer option then see: Content from kb.vmware.com is not included.VMware's KB Disabling simultaneous write protection provided by VMFS using the multi-writer flag.
• VMware "Clustered VMDK" is unsupported on RHEL. For more information on this then see the bugzilla bug:
  • This content is not included.2151286 – Is VMware "Clustered VMDK" a supported storage device used by our resource-agents?

PS: Please note that VMware RDM devices are not mentioned in this note because this is about VMDK (virtual machine disk image files). RDM is not a disk image but a mapping file that acts as a proxy for a raw physical storage device.

Related Articles

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - VMware Virtual Machines as Cluster Members
• Support Policies for RHEL Resilient Storage Clusters - Resilient Storage on VMware
• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - fence_scsi and fence_mpath

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