You can create a named disk and attach it to one or more virtual machines at a later stage.

To create a named disk, you must specify its name and size. You can optionally include a description and select a storage profile to be used by the disk. You can create a shared disk that you can attach to multiple VMs.

Starting with VMware Cloud Director 10.3, if your underlying vSphere virtual infrastructure is version 6.7 or later, you can create a shared disk through physical SCSI bus sharing. However, vSphere 6.7 supports only vSphere Virtual Volumes storage. To use clustered VMDK support for Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC), your underlying vSphere virtual infrastructure must be version 7.0 or later. For more information, see Setup for Windows Server Failover Clustering in the VMware vSphere Product Documentation.

Prerequisites

  1. You must have an organization administrator role or disk owner rights.
  2. If you want to create a shared disk, you must have the Create a Shared Disk right.

Procedure

  1. On the Virtual Data Center dashboard screen, click the card of the virtual data center you want to explore and under Storage, from the left panel, select Named Disks.
  2. Click New.
  3. Enter a name and, optionally, a description of the disk.
  4. Select the storage policy from the Storage Policy drop-down menu.
  5. (Optional) If you select a VMware Cloud Director IOPS storage policy, set an IOPS reservation for the VM.
  6. Enter the size of the named disk.
  7. Select the bus type and subtype, from the Bus Type and Bus Sub-Type drop-down menus, respectively.
  8. Select a Sharing type.
    • When the sharing type is None, you can attach the disk to only one VM.
    • The Disk sharing type creates an underlying independent persistent disk in vSphere with multi-writer mode enabled. The multi-writer option shares the named disk at the disk level so that up to eight VMs across hosts can lock it at the same time. You cannot use WSFC configurations with disk level sharing.
    • The Controller sharing type creates a shared disk through physical SCSI bus sharing and supports configurations like WSFC. With the controller level sharing, up to eight VMs can access the same virtual disk simultaneously. A Windows cluster can have up to five VMs. To avoid simultaneous writes, the guest OS functionality chooses the node that can write on the shared disk.
    You cannot edit this setting later.
  9. Click Save.