How can I create shared disks for Windows SoFS VMs in VMware?

Solution 1:

Even taking into account an upcoming "VHD Set" feature in Windows Server 2016, you would still need some shared storage to store VHDs. Try StarWind Virtual SAN or HP VSA, they both can present local disks on each server as a shared HA Datastore.

From my personal experience, configuring "guest SoFS" may be a pain in the neck in comparison to "hardware SoFS" due to the combination of fail-over algorithms of MS Failover Cluster and vSphere HA Cluster kicking-in at the same time. But it definitely CAN be deployed with some efforts.

Here is a nice guidance describing SoFS deployment on top of the StarWind storage: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/Hyper-V2012_dedicated_iSCSI.pdf