Great for a lab environtment. If we're going to put our eggs in one basket, it's got to be a reliable basket with someone else to blame if something goes wrong. Which seems to put you back in the 10k SAN range, with 5k of that going for the "someone to blame". Which means the economics of a 5 to 10 server rack doesn't make a whole lot of sense, even though we can get vmware itself at a fairly steep discount.
You can still run it over NFS. Running ESX off a NetApp filer via NFS is a supported configuration and gives you several benefits over doing the same with iSCSI. Thin provisioning is one major one. The ability to do a flexclone is another big one.
I suspect this will change as vmware is no longer owned by a storage company, and as VMWare goes after the low end that microsoft will be going after.
EMC still owned the majority of VMware the last time I looked.
There's no reason they can't sync disk images over the management wire, even if it's a little slower.
You can do that already. It just isn't recommended for the same reasons you want to have somebody to blame if something goes wrong with your SAN.
Previous Topic
Index
