How Can we share files between multiple Windows VMs in GCP?

Question

I have 10 Windows VMs where I want to have PD with both read-write in all the VM's. But I came to know that we cannot mount a disk to multiple VMs with read-write. SO I am looking for option where I can access a disk from any of those VMs. For Linux we can use GCSFuse to mount the Cloud storage as a disk, Do we have any option for windows where we can mount a single disk/Cloud Storage buckets to Multiple Windows VMs.

Answer 1

If you want it specifically to be a GCP Disk, your best option will be setting up an additional Windows instance, and set up a shared SMB disk with the other instances.

Another option, if you don't want to get too messy, best option would be using the Filestore service ( https://cloud.google.com/filestore/ ) , which is an NFS as a service, provided you have an NFS client for your Windows version

Answer 2

I believe you could use Google Cloud Storage buckets, which could be an intermediate transfer point between your instances, regardless of OS.

Upload your files from your workstation to a Cloud Storage bucket. Then, download those files from the bucket to your instances. When you need to transfer files in the other direction, reverse the process. Upload the files from your instance and then download those files to your workstation.

To achieve this follow these steps:

1. Create a new Cloud Storage bucket or identify an existing bucket that you want to use to transfer files.
2. Upload files to the bucket
3. Connect to your instance using RDP upload/download files from the bucket.

However, there are other options like using file servers on Compute engine or following options:

1. Cloud Storage
2. Compute Engine persistent disks
3. Single Node File Server
4. Elastifile
5. Quobyte
6. Avere vFXT

These options have their advantages and disadvantages, for more details for the links attached to each of these options.