Hi,
I have absolutely no background in VMware technologies, so please bear with me. I'm just a user of a shared service inside the company where I work.
We have quite a few Linux boxes on which build jobs are executed from a central master (jenkins-ci.org).
Currently we are using a Samba share where each build job has its own workspace folder. There is absolutely no interaction between the folders, each job (VM) reads and writes from and to to its own directory structure.
Unfortunately Samba comes with a performance penalty of almost 30%. The idea was to provide a shared virtual disk from the host and make it accessible to the guest VMs. The KB article VMware KB: Sharing a virtual disk between multiple virtual machines explains some of the issues with such an approach.
The question is, are there any other ways to achieve what I explained above without using Samba or NFS? Data corruption would not be an issue as the read/write operations would be on separate files. Even the fact that the changes in one VM are not visible to the other VM is OK as the jobs work on completely different folders and files.
Thanks,
Michael