Probably the most obscure SHAREDLUN question ever.

[webm]

Hi.

Can One Intel ESX and One AMD ESX share a "SharedLUN"?

I have one AMD and one Intel ESX server, both 3.0.1. I know that vMotion and Migrate VM's will not work between these computers because the processors are from different manufacturers.

That aside, I don't know the internals of VM's well enough to know if the same thing that keeps vMotion and Migrate from working will goof up SharedLUN access? I suspect not, since VM Guest OS "hardware" requirements are the cause of guests not being able to move between processor families.

My server uses hw ISCSI if that matters.

Everything works fine except the VC GUI does not show the number of paths in the "Storage" page for both servers; it will show only one or the other at a time. VM's continue to do IO with path failures etc, it just seems like this is a VC GUI problem.

The esxcfg-mpath -l command on the console does however show the correct path manipulations.

Any ideas?

mark

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

You will be able to share the LUN between your two servers. Also, while you can't vmotion between the 2 servers, you can do a cold migration. That said, with some Linux VMs there's some kernel options to set during the OS install so that it can happen. You can search the forums for that if you run Linux but I think for cold migration to work you need to install on the AMD server.

Can you post the output of esxcfg-mpath -l

[Justin_King]

It will be fine.

The reason AMD and Intel chipsets wont V-Motion from one ot the other is because ESX litterally attempts to copy the memory addressing from one machine to another... AMD and Intel dont map memory in the same way so this ends up in a crash.

FYI: you'd have the same problem if your memory or processor changed from within a vendor as well. Different generation of Pentium chips for example will not v-motion properly.