We don't use RDM because we are not interested in
using SAN technologies like clones and replication.
Even then though it would be a hard sell. There is
very little in the way of a performance difference
and I would hate to give up the portability of the
vmdk\vmfs approach.
You know - I'm pretty much in lock step with you on this aspect, I think I've simply gotten spoiled with the ease of VMFS. Yet this week I ran into a situation where RDM's became an essential piece of the puzzle for me. In a previous solution we had a CMS backend storage area for our websites, using the CMS system we would publish our web content to an NFS share that load balanced Apache webservers would all mount and share out. Everything works fine and dandy- it was just slower than X-Mas. We virtualized this, made the NFS mount an RDM and attached it to the backend server and the apache webservers....man what a difference.
Sorry- back to your regularly scheduled RDM and templates discussion -
