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We've got two Windows Server 2019 virtual machines within the same Azure subscription and subnet. Recently, we have created a Premium SSD azure data disk with 'sharing' enabled and mounted it to those two VMs without any problems. It's perfectly fine to use the disk from both of the machines, but unfortunately files/folders added from one of them are not visible on the other.

Is it possible to somehow truly share the data between the machines using such azure disk attached to both of them? Maybe some super secret PowerShell option/flag when mounting the drives?

The machines are within same domain so obviously we can simply share a folder (which's what we do right now), but here the problem is that whenever our application is writing something to that share, it takes ages due to latencies/long upload times (effectively, it freezes the application for couple of minutes). Yes, they are in the same region (machines and disk). There's this Proximity Placement Groups thing available, but it does not seem to be applicable to disks, unfortunately.

We've also tried Azure Files but we've got exactly same problem as with 'shared folder' within the domain (long upload times whenever our application is writing something to the persistent storage).

I've went through Shared drive between Azure Virtual Machines but there's nothing about seeing the same contents from all machines which have the disk attached and mounted.

Thank you! Would appreciate any ideas.

David Makogon
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Marek Piotrowski
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1 Answers1

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Right so eventually I've found the answer. Basically the machines have to be joined into a failover cluster. Assuming the shared SSD:

  1. is formatted to NTFS on both machines
  2. has the same label on both machines (in my case F:)

if the conditions are met, that particular disk can be added to Cluster Shared Volumes. Program has no problems with writing the data smoothly from both machines.

Marek Piotrowski
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