Alan McKay wrote:
This may seem redundant vs just doing it without openfiler, but as mentioned a lot of the fancy features you only get with virtualized disk.
Doing that for the most part defeats the purpose of using things like Vmotion in the first place, that is being able to evacuate a system to perform hardware/software maintenance on it.
Myself I have 12 vSphere ESXi systems deployed at remote sites using local storage, they run web servers mostly, and are redundant, so I don't need things like vMotion. Local storage certainly does restrict flexibility.
Over complicating things is likely to do more harm than good, and you'll likely regret going down that path at some point so save your self some trouble and don't try. Get a real storage system or build a real storage system to do that kind of thing.
Cheap ones include(won't vouch for any of them personally) http://www.infortrend.com/ http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/index.html http://www.xyratex.com/Products/storage-systems/raid.aspx
Or build/buy a system to run openfiler. At my last company I had a quad proc system running a few HP MSA shelves that ran openfiler. Though the software upgrade process for openfiler was so scary I never upgraded it. And more than one kernel at the time paniced at boot. I'm sure it's improved since then (2 years ago).
nate