Tom to answer your questions :-

1. FC HBA, Open E supports the Qlogic 23** series as targets, and there is a post from GHarding who has this working (only with 2gig cards at present, but it does not say if he is using it with vmware or not. In the test lab i only had a couple of Fibre QLA2310's, i was able to create a FC LUN on open E. ESX could see the LUN, add it as storage and format it VMFS. However when i tried to create a vm on it create the virtual disk got to 99% and then hung the ESX server . I am awaiting a new HBA to test with, as it could have been one of those at fault.

2. You are right Open-E does not support HA failover yet, so it is a cold swap over. For the first test it was to see if it worked correctly with ESX. And as you can see from the results it does. So i can now shut down the VM's running off of 1 DSS server Turn off that DSS server (to upgrade maybe), goto the second Dss server, change the replicated volume to source and click apply. Goto the ESX server, Rescan the ISCSI HBA and it sees the LUN, Then power the VM's back on.. Nothing else to change or do.

I guess that in time Open-E will work on this to get to a solution where this will be possible, as i am sure that many people are asking for HA functionality.. (Open-E guys are you working on a high availibility solution ???)

3. Yes i have sent a PM to you with my email address.

I have been testing what happens if the Source DSS server gets turned off whilst live VM's are running and then swapping over to the replicated data. So far this has been ok, with standard 2003 servers, will have to try SQL and exchange next.. The only obvious thing that happens is that when the VM's get powered it is as if it had crashed (asked why it was not shut down cleanly). Well that was to be expected, so i will continue testing.

I will eventually get around to doing some benchmarking tests on it, but no point until i am happy it works 100% of the time.

When i get another FC HBA i will try it with Fibre. Only downside currently on the fibre side is that the replication still has to go over a normal NIC !!.

Paul