Help choosing central storage for VMware ESX

[Patric Falinder]

Hi,

I need some help with choosing a central storage for my VMware ESX(i) servers.

At the moment I have 5 VMware ESX(i) servers and probably more to come and right now I have about 20-25 virtual machines and growing.

I want to have reliable central storage, SAN?, where I can have all my virtual machines.

I've never done anything like this and need some help and pointers in the right direction.

What do people use when having centralized storage for their VMware ESX servers?

I need something that's easy to expand if needed but also reliable.

Should I use iScsi or some other protocol? What's the best?

I need to use Ethernet so FibreChannel is not an option at the moment.

Any suggestion is appreciated!

Thanks,

-Patric

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi,

For HP's product there is the Lefthand P4000 SAN that you may want to look into for iSCSI.
I've seen quite a few posts about this on the forum. But maybe these aren't available in all regions?
They have 10GbE interfaces (but from what I've read here on the forum the 10GbE switches might be expensive).

The P4300 Starter SAN has 4 x 1GbE ports, is that enough for your system?

Maybe a good start would be to check what kind of performance you will need. And then you can find a few options and compare them.