Ok, the answer to this is simple, but you're not going to like it I imagine. Each odd-numbered blade slot has a few special dedicated traces to the even slot one number higher than it (i.e. 1+2, 3+4, 5+6...15+16). These extra traces can be used to transmit data of any type. In both the SB40c (disk) and 448c (tape) cases this allows these devices to sit in an even numbered slot and server the server in the odd numbered slot one number lower than it (i.e. if it's in slot 2 it serves the server in slot 1) - and ONLY this server, i.e. it's not shared amongst all of the servers in the enclosure. Now then, what does that mean in a VMWare environment? well as you know it's perfectly ok to have VMWare installed on any server's local disks and also to store the VMs to be ran on that server from the same physical disks - that bit's easy. Now what many people want to do is to run VMWare off the server's local disks but store and run the VMs in some form of shared storage (managed using VMFS) so that any of the physical servers can run any of the VMs (and move them with VMotion if available too). This solution requires some form of block-level shared storage such as shared-SAS/SCSI, iSCSI, FC, FCoE etc, but it DOES need this shared storage. What you've bought isn't shared storage, it's directly linked to a single server. So you can run the VMs on the server's local disks but you can't store, and backup, them centrally. I'm also not sure that VMWare could backup to that tape drive anyway to be honest as I've never tried as I backup directly from SAN myself via snap-shoting. So depending on your expectations you may think you've wasted your money - BUT if you do feel this way there may be a way out for you. What you could do is buy another BL460c, connect it to the SB600c next to it, install one of the various flavours of Linux onto it that will allow you to share its local disks as an iSCSI target, then store your VMs on that shared iSCSI volume - that's basically all the SB600c is really. I hope this helps you, if not then drop me a line at phil@buckley-mellor.com or philip.buckley-mellor@bt.com ok.
