No it needs to be shared some way, there is a few ways to do this VMware VSA this allows you to take local storage on ESXi hosts and makes it like shared storage, this is good for small medium businesses that want the features of shared storage but not the cost associated with buying a SAN or NAS.
Second option is to load up freenas or openfiler as a virtual give it local storage and then make it an iSCSI NAS or NFS sharing it out to the other hosts but if the virtual is down so is the storage.
Second if you running a windows 2008 box someehere even as a virtual you can enable unix NFS shares on it and share storage out this way
I dont recommend the 2 later options for something that's in production but fine for a test lab.
Cheers