Nutanix volume groups support attaching storage to one or more VMs. Nutanix documentation for creating volume groups states that if you want to attach a volume group to multiple VMs, you select the Shared option. That is the key requirement when building an application-level high-availability configuration where two database VMs need shared access to the same block storage construct. ( Nutanix Portal )

The other options either describe different capabilities or are not the documented mechanism for this requirement. External client access is used when exposing the volume group to external iSCSI initiators, which is not what the question asks. Storing vDisks on different containers does not create shared access semantics. “Multi-writer mode via storage policy” is not the standard Nutanix answer here; Nutanix’s documented configuration language for this use case is the Shared setting on the volume group itself. So if the requirement is two VMs, same application data path, and application-level HA, the correct Nutanix configuration is to create the VG in shared mode. ( Nutanix Portal )