I would guess that the fastest speed I could get would be to leave the web servers on the local ESX drive rather than running them over the FC network.
This is a tough concept to master. FC is bandwidth. Ethernet is speed. You can get water to flow in a 1/2" garden hose at 12 gallons per minute (let's say). Now if you double that garden hose width to 1" in diameter, that means you can get twice the speed right? Wrong. It just means you can get 24 gallons per minute of water, but the flow speed from the spigot to the bucket is constant. You just increase the amount done at the same speed.
Take another example. 2 lane highway. Cars can travel at maximum velocity of 60Mph. Now you do some construction and double the lanes to 4. How fast will the cars go now? 60Mph. Instead of 2 cars side by side you can now have 4 cars side by side, so people can leave the city faster. That's FC.
Ethernet would be increasing the speed, in the same garden hose you still have 1/2" but you can push more water through faster using the same bandwidth. Or your highway can now allow cars to travel at 120Mph. That's the difference.
Most of the time, in fact 99.99% of the problem SPEED isn't the problem, very very rarely do any servers peg the meter all the time enough to cause problems in your network. Allowing traffic to move at 120 Mph (by increasing the speed limit) downtown isn't going to get people home quicker, downtown needs more streets not faster cars to let people get to where they need to be. That's the principle problem. Where you run into issues is bandwidth, not enough room for things to move around, FC does a much better job than Ethernet, Ethernet is a big cloud of data, all colliding in the middle and coming back out. FC is more of a private network, that everything still runs at a constant speed but more things can go through at once.
Where ethernet gets into trouble is there isn't much to control the speed, and when things get clogged you get congestion and thus things start to run erratically.
So the bottom line is FC beats Ethernet for bandwidth and 'stress' networking. The only reason people use Ethernet is cost. It's cheap. You just need some nics and a switch and you are pretty much done. FC requires planning and there are limitations on how you can connect things to Fiber. That being said, FC will give you WAY more than you can see with Ethernet. So that's why people put everything on FC because it's the ultimate in throughput.
Either way, the real question is, rather than have the web servers using up Ethernet bandwidth to get at their pages, how could I shared a FC vdisk between these servers?You can get a network monitor and see what your traffic is doing on the web. If you are using more than 5% of your TOTAL bandwidth for a web, I would be shocked. Websites are just plain inefficient. It's just text, all going through a very simply protocol. You have images and other things, but images can be optimized to make better use of your network.What you want is clustering. You can set up a web cluster, you don't need to share vdisks for that, this is all built into your Web solution, if it's not you need a better web solution. IIS is perfect for this, because it supports Microsoft Clustering and the web pages can 'share' each other through the network you don't need to share the data disks.
