I used defaults to set up the datastores. The esx-local store is VMFS 3.31 filesystem, 265GB total size, 132GB free, block size 1MB. The Windows-based store is NFS, and has 107/232GB available, but I can't get its properties. Not in the right-click dropdown, greyed out on the screen. Maybe its not relevant with NFS?

My Openfiler iSCSI test server crashed, and I've rebuilt it, but now I can't add the storage in ESX. The LUN shows up in the iSCSI Software Adapter details, but when I go to Add Storage -> Disk/Lun, it doesn't show up in the Device Location list. That's supposed to be automatic, so I've got no idea what to do about that.

So I'm thinking it's probably not a block size or file size issue, but I'd be more certain if I could get it to mount that iSCSI LUN.

/kenw

OF kacked in the middle of the VM copy again, though, toasting it's internal RAID configuration again. So I'm done with OpenFiler; I expect I'll try one of the Windows-based products. But it'll probably be a week before I can do anything further; got a bunch of other stuff happening.

So at this point it's not clear what the problem is. It may actually be more than one problem.

One saving grace is that I was able to back up the VMs to an SMB share via the ESXbackup script posted here, and was actually able to restore and test one of them, so I know it works.

I'm curious, though: is 1GB ethernet really fast enough to use to host iSCSI-based live VMs? Is there much of a performance hit vs local storage?

/kenw