SuperMicro BigTwin SSG-2029-DN2R24L...and VMware ESXi Part#1

This 2U server holds two compute nodes and has a shared backplane to 24 U.2 dual path NVMe drives.

Each compute node has a X11DSN-ts motherboard, containing a M.2 slot, twelve DDR4 memory slots, dual LGA-3647 sockets (this one has Xeon Gold 6140 CPU's).  For networking they have two Intel 1gb/10gb RJ45 NICs plus two more Intel 10gb NICs that are strictly node-to-node communication.

This system poses some questions.  How will VMware react to have having two hosts accessing the very same hard drives?  Is VM failover possible with out vCenter?  What will vCenter think about the shared datastore?  How will storage vMotion work?  And what about those internal NICs?   

ESXi 7 was installed onto the onboard M.2 NVMe drive.  Virtual switches were setup, one for the added in PCI-e 100gb NICs, one for the two onboard 1/10gb NICs, and a third for the two internal NICs (the ones for node-to-node communication).  A single VM was created on each host, and connected to the internal switch.  It was confirmed that a VM on host-A could communicate to a VM on host-B.

A datastore was created using one of the U.2 NVMe drives on host-A.  Host-B didn't pick up this datastore until after a reboot.  I am sure there is someway of refreshing how ESXi scans for new/existing datastores that are local.  Additional disks to the datastore were added as an extent on host A.  Host B automatically picked up the size increase, without having to reboot.

A VM on host-A was stood up; host-B could not register that VM until it was shutdown. After registering the VM on host B, host A did not seem to care or know anything was different, other than it still showed the VM as powered off.  Rebooting host A shows those VMs as invalid.  VMware file locking is taking affect in the background.  After shutting down the VM, waiting a few minutes, refreshing the screen, that VM could not be powered on; on host-A.  It appears the only way to bring the VM back to the original host is to unregister the VM and register it.