Quote Originally Posted by TRoffo
Hello,

I would like to use open-e DSS in the following manner to use as storage for vmware 2.0 servers, but am not entirely sure it is possible:
Well it's possible, but then I would ask, why not use ESXi?
The only reason I can think of is that your Host hardware is not compatible?
We have found the key is to ensure a decent RAID controller(Eg Adaptec 2405 and flash SATA disks to Raid compatible firmware if required.

We run both here, and ESXi beats VMware server for robustness, hands down.
VMware server is nice for running simple little VM's with not a lot of I/O and/or CPU requirements, but it really has limits for manageability.
How were you planning on backing up the host?

RE Replication, not 100% sure how you are planning to do this, I'm assuming you want to replicate the VMware Server VM store while it has running VM's?
We have not tried this in production, simply because iSCSI seemed a better way to go and the NFS performance was not as good as iSCSI.

But if you use ESXi and iSCSI then File I/O and BlockI/O replication.
It works really well, just follow the Open-E Whitepaper to set it up. And as per Todd's advice don't enable Writeback cache on your iSCSI Targets.
The end result is that the data is replicated at the block level, so you only xfer changed data.

Rgds Ben.