Advise for a home rolled SAN for VMware

[CyberPunk_1000]

So I’ve been reading around and I want to put together a reasonable SAN for my home general use and VMware lab.

I’m thinking iSCSI. It should be supporting around four to five VM’s at low load most of the time and occasionally manipulating large files (vmware images, Linux ISOs etc). It should also accommodate my test VM’s which range from Exchange clusters to stand alone Linux.

My thinking is to go with a Intel Atom 330 and something like a LSI RAID card with 2GB RAM and 8x 2TB Hard disks. I’ll probably have a VM running SAMBA for file shares as well.

I was wondering if anyone has a setup like this or any advise etc? I’ve tried FreeNAS and Openfiler with drastically varying results on an FX55 and a HP Microserver with 2x SATA drives. I’m not expecting industrial SAN levels of performance but I’d hope better than say a QNAP or similar. I’m thinking Atom to keep power, heat and noise down.

So any advise tips, tricks etc? I’d be particularly interested in seeing iometer benches on various systems so I can get an idea of scaling.

 

[lizardking009]

I'm using Fedora 14 and the included NFS Server. It works fine for vSphere, including vMotion.

 

[danswartz]

I would go with openindiana + napp-it. ZFS is a very nice feature on a SAN...