is it possible to share a VMDK between two Windows Hosts running on ESXi? I don't want to share the disk via CIFS because one windows machine acts as a VPN-Client where the VPN-Client-Software is blocking the network completely and I am not able to mount a disk via network. Just to make it clear: I have 2 windows VMs running on ESXi (Win1 and Win2) and I want to have the same harddisk accessible from both VMs (not the system drive of cause!). When I put a file on that drive from Win1 it should be accessible from Win2, even without a working network connection.
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The key is to use virtual scsi bus sharing! which turns a vmdk, into shared disk between VMs.
refering to a VMWare whitepaper: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-mscs-guide.pdf
You can't share a normal NTFS volume with two Windows computers - you need a cluster aware filesystem to do that.
So you'll need to dismount the volume from one computer before mounting it on the other computer.