I have created an Azure shared disk and attached on the 3 VMs. But when I create a file on one of the VMs, the same file is not appearing on the other VM.

Question

I have created an Azure shared disk and attached on the 3 VMs. But when I create a file on one of the VMs, the same file is not appearing on the other VM.

Answer 1

Hello Abhishek Zende,

Greetings! Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform.

Azure Shared Disks are primarily designed for clustered applications and specific workloads. Azure shared disks are supported on Windows Server 2008 and newer (as well as on some versions of Linux). Azure shared disks allows you to attach a managed disk to multiple VMs simultaneously and uses a cluster manager, to achieve shared file access between VMs using shared disks, you need to use a cluster manager like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC), or Pacemaker, that handles cluster node communication and write locking.

There are several use cases here so it's best to refer to the documentation (which does provide quite a bit of information on flow and architecture). I've included the example below:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-shared

The following is an example of a 2-node WSFC using clustered shared volumes. With this configuration, both VMs have simultaneous write-access to the disk, which results in the ReadWrite throttle being split across the two VMs and the ReadOnly throttle not being used.

Make sure your VM's all are placed on same availability set and zone, The differences are noted on the page: Availability options for Azure Virtual Machines

Each Availability Zone has a distinct power source, network, and cooling. Where an availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide for redundancy and availability.

Azure Files is an alternative solution that offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Additionally, Azure file shares can be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used. This will allow you to read and write to the same location without extra software. I recommend reading through Planning for an Azure Files deployment for more details.

Hope this answer helps! Please let us know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further.

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