On Oct 20, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote: >> I thought the original object was to make the space available to >> multiple VMware ESX(i) servers so you could vmotion guests among >> them. >> Can ESX construct raids out of multiple iscsi sources? > > Well, my original may have been a bit obtuse because I do not really > know what I am looking for :-) > > I have a bunch of local disk all over the place. I eventually want > to virtualize everything, so I'd like a way to virtualize that > localdisk and do fancy things with it :-) If you have a bunch of disperse local disks you could export them via iSCSI or AoE or NBD to a head server that could then use mdraid and LVM to then aggregate that storage and share it out again to clients, ESX hosts and VMs via NFS/CIFS or iSCSI depending on their needs. I myself use XFS over NFS for guest OS disks, then have iSCSI provide storage for the apps inside the guest VMs. With a good storage controller this proved to be both the best performing and easiest to implement. If you are aggregating disperse storage you could even use simple network storage protocols like AoE or NBD on the local storage servers and use RAID10 on the head server to make it fault tolerant. -Ross