I have a .VHDX volume that's a cluster shared volume in a Server 2012 R2 failover cluster. I'm able to share the hard drive between two VMs. If I create a folder on VM2, it doesn't show in VM1 in the hard drive unless I reboot that machine or go into disk management > rescan disks > import disk. Is this normal behavior?
One thing of note I found on TechNet's site was this:
When you use shared VHDX with local block storage, synchronization must occur for shared VHDX file access. If the virtual machines are running on different nodes, this involves network redirection for the synchronization activity. If you have fast block connectivity combined with slow intra-cluster network communication, this synchronization activity results in I/O variance (either redirected or direct) based on the node. This happens on a per file basis. (The entire CSV is not in redirected mode.) To increase performance, we recommend that you scale the intra-cluster network.
Be aware that this is not a consideration when you use file-based storage. When you use a compute layer of file-based storage over SMB together with a remote Scale-Out File Server (SOFS), this shared file access orchestration is performed by the SOFS. With a SOFS, SMB sessions are transitioned to optimize file access. The SMB sessions co-exist on the same node that performs the synchronization. As a result, there is no network communication.
I've used both the VHDX directly as just a VHD in the CSV and as a VHD in an SOFS share in the CSV. Doesn't seem to make any difference.
