how to get local storage between 2 hosts working like a San

[SuckingTaps]

I am doing some voluntary work for a school. Short Story is ...acquired 2 brand new 2 x Dell 710s with 2.8 tb each. (light bulb went off)

School is using about 200GB a year, go virtual and school ( us parents) won't need to fork out any cash for any more server hardware for 5 years!

Installed esxi 4.1 on both servers (no brainer) , suss out prices for acedemic licences for vshere 4.1 essential +, and this is where you guys hopefully come in ...

Config:

Initial Infrastructure would be the following: 2 x Domain Controllers, 1 x fileserver , 1x SCCM server and 1 x Sharepoint Server for now.

my ? is as the servers come with iSCSI i/o's , is it possible to get both  servers seeing each others local storage as remote storage, as in like a direct connected san? so I can reap the benefits of HA, Vmotion, etc...

[DSTAVERT]

Welcome to the communities.

vSphere is limited to 2TB - 512bytes per LUN so you will need to make sure you break your array using logical drives (RAID controller bios).

It is possible to use a virtual storage appliance like FreeNAS, Open-e, Openfiler, running on each host and share this storage between hosts. There will be some limitaitons. vSphere 5 will have an avaliable Virtual Storage Appliance vSA that will allow you to do this. The vSA is not necessarily an inexpensive solution. I would set up FreeNAS or one of the other solutions and try it. It may work for your situation.

[SuckingTaps]

Thanks for taking the time and I will try out your suggestion .