Ubuntu Linux - Shared VHDX

I have two Ubuntu web servers using a shared Hyper-v vhdx file in a Hyper-V cluster as a data drive because the Nimble SAN does not support NFS Connections.

However, while both servers are able to access the VHDX, it would seem that only one server has data visible.

Are there any suggestions on how I might resolve this particular issue?

Solution 1:

Setup a third machine that acts as a NFS server (or use one of the servers as NFS server). Normal Linux file systems can not be mounted from multiple machines.

Solution 2:

You can’t share block device with non-clustered file system like NTFS, ReFS, Ext3/4 or ZFS on top... There’s nobody to arbiter concurrent writes, metadata updates etc. Good story here:

https://forums.starwindsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1392

So either you switch to clustered file system or use network redirector like f.e. SMB3 or NFS.

Solution 3:

You're really asking a question about the configuration of Ubuntu. Shared VHDX just presents a disk to both VMs, one which support the SCSI-3 "Persistent Reservations" feature. In general, you need to use a cluster file system in a situation like this.

When I google this, the first one that comes up is OCFS2. I also see Lustre, Gluster and Ceph in the results. I'm sure there are others. Which one you should use depends entirely on your needs.