[OpenAFS] Running OpenAFS in Vmware ESX host

[Matthew Cocker]

Neulinger, Nathan wrote:
> No, we'll possibly look at it down the road, but couldn't afford the
> infrastructure required to support vmotion. (Have to have hugely
> expensive SAN hardware underneath.) When ESX adds support for iSCSI
> devices, we'll likely look more into vMotion. 

We are due to replace some really badly performing Dell attached storage 
in which we have had numerous disk failures in which the hardware 
(enclosure backplane/raid cards) do not take the disk off-line (raid 5 
sets). The first you know about the "bad" disk is your linux server 
starting to complain about failed writes or other disk errors. 
Unforunately often by the time someone can intervene the raid set is in 
a real bad way (at which point what is the point of raid5).

Anyway it turned out cheaper to buy a IBM DS400 with 4.5TB of SCSI disk, 
dual controllers (1Gb cache each) and a cisco 8 port FC switch (+2 iscsi 
ports) than to replace all the attached storage we have. The problem 
then is how to do everything with only 8 FC + 2 iscsi ports until we can 
  afford to extend the fabric plus the fact that IBM will not support 
Debian connecting to the SANs and software comes from a different budget 
are all reason why we are looking so hard at ESX for all our servers, if 
it is compatible.

Cheers

Matt