Any idea if / when SATA will be supported by ESX VM's

[AnonymousOne]

Any idea if / when SATA will be supported by ESX VM's ?

This is so important for the IT guy who is trying to do on the job training / learning.

The more people / machines that can install ESX, the more money VMware will make in the long run.

This more important now with the up coming release of Seagate's ES.2 enterprise SATA 24x7 drives.

It means that small businesses can afford to buy ESX because they don't have the hardware $$ limitation.

(PS- I know you can buy $ SATA controlers to trick ESX but thats just more money to spend not to mention that solution is not "supported" by VMware)

[waynegrow]

What about VMware Server?

[esiebert7625]

If and when it will be supported VMware will not release this information ahead of time (unless you have an NDA).

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Currently SATA is still considered a not-very robust technology. Until the MTBF goes way down. I would not expect it to be part of ESX. This is an arguable point however, and I do not use SATA for anything due to this concern.

Generally within a single release # I.e. v3, they do not change the disk capabilities much as this requires new drivers for both the Linux kernel and the vmkernel. Which would also mean possibly basing everything on RHEL4 which is a pretty major effort.

While we we do not know when it will be supported as Eric states, I would be pleasantly surprised if we see it implemented in ESX v3.

Best regards,

Edward

[AnonymousOne]

With Enterprise SATA RE2 and ES.2 the MTBF has gone way up 1.2 million hours of run time at 100% load.

Not perfect but still worthy of concideration ... remember any money saved on hardware can be used to buy VMware licenses.

As to the rework of the OS support .. yeah I can see that as a big issue.

VM server is a choice but there is overhead associated with running on top of a full OS. I am sure it is many peoples last resort ... but the other side of the coin that no one wants to think of ... some of the compition support SATA. This is not my way but I am sure others have been forced to go this route to save $$$.