— 1 min read

I’d first like to point out that although the VMDKs are shared between hosts using a shared SCSI BUS they are not synched, meaning that if you write to the mounted point on any machine it will not display on other machines with the same mount point until you remount the drive. Annoying, but understandable.

To business.

First off all machines that you want to share this VMDK with will need to be OFFLINE.

Next up we create the VMDK, I find it easiest to do this by adding hardware to an already existing machine, I’m going to use one that I want the VMDK shared with to make it even simpler.

Create a new disk

You will need to enable clustering features as shown below, this means you cannot use thin provisioning.

Choose disk size

You will need to add the VMDK to a new SCSI BUS, this will usually begin with 1: or …

 — 4 min read

Over the last two days I’ve had the interesting task of online some VMs from clones and increasing their disk space to accommodate a mass of user uploaded content. I’ve done this before but never actually with an Logical Volume Management (LVM) disk.

My first approach, like a fool, was to clone the VM from source and boot it from a remotely mounted GParted ISO, this didn’t actually go as expected and I was unable to add it to the LVM, I found a nice guide online and consulted a colleague because I knew he’d done something similar recently. After the first successful size increase I realised I was able to do it without ever rebooting the machine itself, this is accomplished by actually adding an extra disk to the VM, this disk can then be partition with cfdisk and then added to the LVM, thus …