Currently all our production VMWare 3.5 is on an OpenFiler iSCSI SAN. We are moving forward with Open-E because of the iSCSI fail over and volume replication. I started to setup 2x Open-E trials and had the volume replication and iSCSI failover working. My plan was to move all the VM's w/ Storage VMotion from openfiler to open-e once I was confident the performance and stability was what we were looking for and then purchase 2 - 4TB DSS licenses. Once this was complete, we would upgrade our VMWare 3.5 to vSphere 4. After reading this post, I am now hesitant to pump the brakes on this approach. I did get the beta from you (thanks very much) and have the second SAN upgraded. I am rather impressed so far and actually excited for this release because you have just fixed my USB issues with my Dell 2950's. I have a 4GB SATA DOM that I was able to install version 6 on with no issues! This was how OpenFiler was setup so I happen to have extra SATA DOMs.
Now...since I am testing these systems on our production vmware, I want to make sure I don't get stuck in a bind before upgrading VMware. Since v5 of Open-E will not work with vSphere 4, but testing goes well with the beta of v6 what are the next steps? Will version 6 be available within the 60 day trial? If I go ahead and purchase the 2 version 5 modules, will I be able to use version 6 beta with vsphere 4 without it expiring and losing data?
I hope this makes some sense and if not, please feel free to send me a private message and we can arrange a call. I want to help out in the beta testing, but I also have a deadline I must meet with providing redundant storage for vmware and upgrading to vsphere. I might be able to dig up some test hardware, but I don't think I could really put it to the test like I could with our production :-)
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