LUN Sharing in Non-Clustered Environment

Q: I created a LUN and made it available to multiple non-clustered Hyper-V hosts. It's taking a long time for changes to be seen on other nodes sharing the LUN. What can I do?

A: Stop! This is completely unsupported, and it isn't a good idea. NTFS isn't a shared file system. Taking a single LUN, formatting it as NTFS, and then making it available to multiple non-clustered hosts is likely to result in corruption. The only way to share a LUN between nodes in a safe and supported fashion is to make the nodes part of a cluster, then make the volume a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). This adds the CSV filter driver on top of NTFS, which enables the concurrent read/write of a shared LUN and handles metadata changes (which typically cause corruption on shared NTFS) through the use of a coordinator node.