A colleague recently went to the VMware PEX in Florida, he attended the "VMware View 4.5 Reference Architecture" workshop.
He was shown a recommended View configuration using SSD's in a RAID0 arrangement.
My understanding is that the SSD's used (Intel X-25M) had a SATA interface so I presume it follows that they must have been attached to a SATA RAID controller of some sort?
I understand that "IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system." Does this mean that even though a VMware representative stated it was a "reference" model, if we used it in a production environment, any problems we had with it would not be supported?
Using SSD's within the host for the linked clones makes a lot of sense, but the relatively small capacity of these drives means to get any useful storage out of them you have to RAID stripe them. Also having them as local storage rather than from a storage array (apart from the horrendous cost of EFD's) means less stress on the array and a better response for the client.
I think I've probably already answered my question before asking it, so crystal ball time - do the new caching features coming in View 5 mean that SATA RAID will soon be supported?
As more SATA RAID products appar, our preference would be to use RAID 5 or 6 (some sort of redundancy) but is this just a pipe dream?
We are getting a lot more enquires regarding VDI and it would be helpful to know where VMware were going with it. Is it even worth promoting this model to potential clients apart from use as a POC?
