storing virtual machines on iscsi

[baumer1122]

I need some implementation advice. I have a limited budget (<$10k) and would like to implement 6-10 virtual machines that can be automatically snapshotted and shuttled offsite. Reliability and cost are my biggest concerns. I am willing to sacrifice speed to meet those needs.

I am currently looking at putting the free VMWare Server on a CentOS 5 box connected via iSCSI to an OpenSolaris NAS w/ ZFS for snapshots and easy storage expansion. I would store my live VMs on the NAS.

Would I be able to get away with SATA drives in either box or do I need to step up to SAS for decent speed?

Would I need to implement snapshotting at the NAS filesystem level or does the free server have the capability to automatically snapshot for offsite backup?

What else should I be aware of? Any recommendations are appreciated.

[oreeh]

VMware Server is able to do a snapshot of the VM.

However - a snapshot in VMware terms is NOT the same term as a snapshot you are used to from SANs!

A VMware snapshot creates a new virtual disk where all subsequent changes are written too (until you commit or delete the snapshot).

You can however use this to create a backup of the VM.

Create a snapshot, backup the original disk and after the backup commit the snapshot.