What are some benifits to sharing a virtual disk?

[BDigital99]

I have 2 XP VMs sharing 1 virtual disk. I'm not sure what some advantages are to this because I can only have 1 VM powered on at a time and when I make changes to 1, like installing a program or moving icons (just as a test) the changes are applied to my second VM that is sharing the same virtual disk. But I can't see that until I power off "VM1" and then power on "VM2". Can someone please give me a better understanding why and how this feature is beneficial in Vsphere.

Thanks! all help is GREATLY appreciated

BDigital99

[ShaneWendel]

You'd use shared VMDKs if you were doing some type of clustering file system completely contained within Vmware, like Microsoft Cluster Services or Oracle RAC, and you wanted to avoid or didn't have access to RDMs.

Without a clustering file system, it's not very useful.

-

---

Shane Wendel, VCP

[BDigital99]

Thank you Shane----

---

very helpful