So my system has 2 discrete graphics cards and 2 windows VM's setup with a graphics card dedicated to each of them.  A 'standard' 2 gamers on 1 PC setup.  Each vm is installed on its own vdisk of course, but in order to save ssd disk space I had created a single partition to share game installs between the 2 vm's.  So in Steam, I use the 'shared' partition as the library install point, and when either vm is loaded they can access the installed game.

 

Only recently did I actually try to run both vm's at the same time and discovered that when one vm is running, it locks the 'shared' gaming partition and prevents the other vm from running.  In retrospect this makes sense since I'd imagine it would corrupt files if 2 systems were writing to it at the same time.  But is there any way around this?  Is it possible for the 2 vm's to be 'aware' of each other, still mount the shared partition, and just prevent files in use from being loaded (i.e. the same game or save game file)?  

Did you try to mount and map the partition in the 2 vms as a smb share?

For my steam games I load them from a smb drive and they work quite well.

No, I haven't tried that.  So it's a bit more complicated than I implied above.  I actually had moved an original bare metal install of windows to a vm, and have an ntfs partition that was originally on that system that I use for my steam library.  So for the 2 other vm's that I mentioned above (true actual vm's), I was mounting that ntfs partition as a separate mapped drive - but can only boot up 1 of those 2 vm's at the same time.  

 

Is it possible to mount an ntfs partition as an smb share for the vm's?