[ale] SATA, iSCSI, and ESX

[Ben Alexander]

On 11/27/07, Ashley Wilson <awilson at smartfurniture.com> wrote:
> Forgive me if this is an absolutely stupid question... but is it possible to
> get decent performance out of an iSCSI SAN full of SATA disks backing an ESX
> server?  Has SATA advanced enough that it could be a reasonable (if somewhat
> lesser-performing) alternative to SAS or SCSI disks in an iSCSI SAN?  The
> VMs are dev only, but the SAN would have a built-in NAS feature hosting
> users' home folders.  Am I trying to do too much with too little?
> Thanks,
> -Ash

I am in process of setting up exactly what you mention above.  ESX
3.0.2 with an Intel SSR212MC2 and a bunch of 500gb SATA 300 drives,
RAID to be determined.  I'm going to be using iscsi-target on linux,
just like Anandtech uses in their Affordable storage (iSCSI) article
on:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3147&p=5

I'm probably a week or two away from being able to test on it and see
how the performance is.