Hi,
SATA local storage will not give you the same performance as SAS local storage. As soon as you want to run more as a couple of VMs, your performance goes down big time.
The question is already if your SATA array will be recognized, although i expect it might work with ESX3.5 Update 4.
It depends, did you check the storage controller on the HCL?
Like your reseller, i expect you to have IO problems in this setup (first in order to get it working, next on performance)
It will work for a lab, not so much for production.
Also make sure that your storage controller has a battery backed cache
--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Hi guys,
Thanks for the information 
I apprecaite you clarifying the SATA issues and potential problems.
Cheers!
Hi,
Well support for using SATA disks has only been added recently. So the issue can be that there simply is no driver in the package, it depends on the storage controller that you will be using.
You could check against the HCL here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
The other problem i expect to see is scalability, but if you run not many VMs you might not notice it.
SATA just doesn't cut it when you want to run many virtual machines, raid 10 might mitigate it a little bit, but using SAS disks will be better.
--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
Visit the VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
The two SAS drives are almost a waste. Those kind of drives can actually perform quite well for running VMs from. SATA.... not so much. Luckilly, it is no rocket science Imagine you would have four physical servers with a single SATA drive. How well would they perform (not looking at redundancy, just performance). If you put these four SATA drives in an ESX(i) server, you could expect about the same performance. So keeping that in mind, you could run 4, 5 maybe even 10 VM servers without issues from them.
A lot of people expect to be able to run 40 VMs from them. If you tell them that 10 VMs would share a single spindle, that ussually triggers their mind into the right setting ... Just do not expect your 50 physical servers (having 100+ mostly SCSI disks!) will run from 4 SATA drives and you'll be fine.
Also, look at costs versus spindlesize. You can go for very large SATA, in your case you would end up with 2TB. Ifyou run 10 VMs from them, all using 15GB of disk, you can only fill your SATA drives up to 1015 = 150GB! You should leave the rest EMPTY. Thats ok if you hafve a master backup-to-disk scenario to run at night, but otherwise I would look at 4146GB / 15K, which will get you much further performance-wise...
Bear in mind, this is not an exact science (for example: it is hard to tell how many spindles are actually used in a RAID10 config; basically it is only two, but the RAID1 sets might add read performance on top of that if you have a smart controller)... Cache will also help a lot. It is merely meant to make you understand the global nature of things.
Visit my blog at http://erikzandboer.wordpress.com
