Hi there, something of a question and potentially something of a feature request/feedback item.
Within Windows, especially in the latest versions, you can combine multiple sources of storage into one storage pool, which has its own abstracted raid based on those independent storage devices. For example, 4 cheap iSCSI devices, with an abstracted RAID on top of it, treating each device (or more specifically the LUN presented from each device) as a separate RAID member.
The big question is why would you want to do this. The answer (my answer) is that it allows all the advantages of RAID, such as the performance and resilience. Sure the iSCSI device has its own raid, but it's still just a cheap device; a backplane failure, or a power failure, or anything of that nature, and it'll fail outright - they lack the resilience of enterprise storage. By adding an abstracted RAID layer, this failure becomes all but irrelevant. It also allows the performance improvements that you would expect depending on your RAID level used.
Another possible use-case would be to add an archival chunk of storage into a datastore for those blocks that never really get accessed often. Would allow you to extend an enterprise storage array with junky storage, to improve your storage array's lifespan.
I have used it within Windows to great advantage, but I'd love to be able to do it from within VMware. We use Veeam to back up our data, and as that isn't part of the virtual environment, it cannot be backed up.
Is there already an offering that meets this concept?
