The whitepaper that I finished recently was new for me on many levels. It was my first whitepaper here at VMware which meant that I learned the review and publishing process. ESX 4.0 was also still under development when I started, so I got to learn about how to get new builds and report bugs. Which was all pretty cool.

I also used a NetApp FAS6030 storage array for the testing. Prior to this work I didn't have much exposure to NetApp and I didn't know what to expect. There are a few things that I wanted to note here that were surprising to me in working with the NetApp array for the first time.

1. The snapshots work really well. I was impressed with how the aggregate level snaps worked and how well they performed.

2. NFS on the NetApp array is better than I expected. I didn't think that it would be as close as it ended up being to the FC results.

3. It is really easy to use NFS with ESX. I didn't realize how easy it use NFS as a data store for ESX until I had done the setup.

4. The NetApp people that I worked with were good and it has been cool to interact via twitterand blogs with them as well. OK - so this shouldn't be categorized as surprising.

These were just a few things that didn't really fit in the whitepaper and the type of general stuff I think makes for good blog posts (If you are into this kind of tech stuff).

Todd